Here's another industry that relies on aggregating your data: Credit reports.

Go ahead. Figure out how to opt out of Experian, Transunion, or Equifax collecting everything they can about you, including pretty much every piece of data needed for identity theft, possibly confusing it with someone with a similar name, and then putting it in a badly-secured database.

No, really, if you can figure it out I'd love to know. Every now and then I am reminded they exist and that they are silently creating these vast troves of data without anyone's consent, and all I can do is hope that if my identity information is included in a data breach, I am both small enough and lucky enough to not be impacted.

And they have an API to these data. Selling your data to data vendors. And now this: https://www.melissa.com/industries/healthcare

Health records used for AI machine learning training . Your health data are in the vendor database . What possibly could go wrong?

You can't opt out of cities' car culture by not driving: the rest of the city is all there all the time. You can't opt out of a data economy by your individual isolated action: the rest of the economy is vacuuming up similar people's data all the time.

facebook has a profile for you even if you don't have a facebook account

That doesn't end the data economy. It sort of ends part of your personal interaction with the data economy.

If enough people end their own interaction with it it ceases to exist, right?

If nobody gave their data to services that sell it on or use it for profit then there is no data economy.

A person would have to live a Kaczynski-like lifestyle to not interact with services that aggregate and sell data. No credit card, no cellphone, no internet. Cash only.

The point is that for each person that ends their interaction with these companies the less data they have on everyone. If only one tenth of my friends use facebook they will have less data on me than if 9 tenths do.

Convincing even one person to choose more privacy friendly choices helps a little.

'sort of' doing a great deal of work here.

But that doesn't stop their abuse.

Think about all the other websites out there using Google Analytics, FaceBook "Like" buttons, Twitter excerpts, etc.

You're ever getting away.

In theory. I've deleted my Facebook account. Few years later needed to create new one and used same e-mail address. Guess what welcomed me! My old account! Heck, even posts I had deleted and whole journal (or however its called) related to them, yes it was back again, waiting to be clicked "unhide".

Its heartbreaking that on HN, the one place that should be informed about this, you still see the ignorant commend "well you don't have to use facebook"

Even if you are homeless and living under a bridge, facebook will have photos of you, uploaded by others, they will know who you are and whwre you like will sell some data relating to you to someone

True, but there is no practical way to get through our work days without them using us anyway.