Five years after that, they make homosexual practices retroactively illegal. They look through your profile and found evidence of gay activity. You go to the internment camp, never to be seen again.
If the above scenario sounds unrealistic to you, you haven't studied history well enough.
To expand the topic a bit, imagine a government like Nazi Germany or any of the communist dictatorships, but with all this information at their disposal. The Red Khmers mass-murdered people who wore glasses, on the basis that they were intellectuals. Imagine such a regime with the tools to figure out, via mass, automated profiling, exactly who all the potentially subversive elements might be, and execute them all ahead of time, leaving a population consisting mostly of nice obedient types who never read any other book than the Da Vinci Code.
If the above scenario sounds unrealistic to you, that's right. It is unrealistic, just like the one you painted.
I'd rather not tell Google everything about myself but I'm honestly shocked that such extreme examples are being used to argue against the idea. By invoking Nazi analogies to make your point, you're actually doing a disservice to your argument. The instinct of my irrational mind is to think: well if it needs another Hitler to make it really scary, then I can probably ignore it.
I just finished reading the NYT best-seller In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin [1]. It made me think that, notwithstanding Godwin's Law [2], citizens should continue to be mindful of what can happen in a 'civilized' society.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Beasts-Terror-American-Hitlers/... (not an affiliate link).
My plan to deal with this is to keep extremely aware of the political evolution where I live and to make sure that if it looks like such a regime is about to take power, I'm on the other side of the world with my family when that happens.
What's your plan?
If you don't want "the next Hitler" you need your political system to be designed to avoid allowing "him" to happen. Communism largely failed as a system because it consistently brought out the worst dictators in each country and put them on top. Having all this data in one place has no historical precedent. It is only smart to at least consider the worst case, given the potential damage.
If you don't like the Hitler analogy, then consider something close to home:
What would the Taliban have done with all this data on their people? The answer seems pretty obvious.
With everything linked onto one site, all you need is for that future oppressive government to have access to Google's archives to know everything about you - whether it was in the form of a purchase, a search, an email, a calendar item, a shared document subsequently deleted, a visit on a site with doubleclick or google ads, etc.
It's a totalitarian regime's wet dream come true.
"I don't like X anymore, give me all the dirt on him." "Here you go."
Or even, criticising the bundling together of any multiple services:
"The town of X is too libertarian. Send everyone a file outlining the illegal things each of them has done over the last 20 years online which would make them liable to immediate internment."
Even just the fact that google owns AdSense could be a problem from this point of view:
"Round up all those who ever arrived on a google-monitored page via hacker-news links. People from that place are 98% more likely to be subversive. I want them all shot."
It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And history shows that sometimes, they are.
No single entity should be made so powerful, the temptation to abuse it is just too high.
You're the prime suspect, even though you didn't even know your neighbor, you've never spoken to him in your life and didn't even know he existed. The only incriminating evidence the police have found on anyone so far is your purchase history (or maybe you also googled for "death by tomato sauce drowning" once when you were in high-school?). If everything turns out alright you enjoy being interrogated for a few days and have a good story to tell for the rest of your life.
Now, there are a lot of people asking that same question: so what if an advertiser knows more about my habits than I do? So what if someone from work sees my vacation photos?
And, maybe, if everyone sort of agrees that all this is OK, then it really will be.
Some people are still clinging on to their healthy paranoia, though. I don't trust any company, large or small, not to harm me if it suits their bottom line -- even if I'm not imaginative enough to guess how they might do that.
That is probably the fundamental reason why it's bad. It's either everything open, and everyone understands everybody, or complete privacy and disclosure of information on your terms. The former is impossible to attain. If you have something in the middle where random snapshots of yourself leak out like that, the data should be useless since no one can form 100% certain conclusions from it. But people will no doubt try to form conclusions from that incomplete data anyways. This could be accusing you of a crime, or simply thinking less of you. The only right way is to ask you and for you to reply honestly. We probably can't achieve a totally honest world like that either, but we should strive for one where we depend less on privacy leaks and more on direct honest communication.
They do that now.
However, I could see the point where interactions would start by exchange of a data file, giving far more information than we ever normally get from even an acquaintance, which would aid interactions.
On the contrary I can't see how things can work without making judgements about people (what language to start a conversation in for example) when interacting.
Privacy is valuable because is respects human dignity, not because it protects you from bad things. I imagine nothing bad would happen to you if I rifled through your underwear drawer and read all your text messages but it isn't really a respectful thing to do.
Sometimes it doesn't even take a mix but just a single ingredient:
http://consumerist.com/2009/09/grandmother-arrested-for-buyi...
You argument is the same as the "I've got nothing to hide, why should I be worried" argument in another dress.
The flip side of that coin is that your imagination should not be the deciding factor in whether or not you care about your privacy. What bad things you can or can not envision today isn't all that important, it is simply that an expectation of privacy is something that should be yours without having to ask for it.
Everything is already there with credit card payment. Most governments/judiciary system can already ask for this data (and it is tied to a real life identity).
Edit: and since like many people I already lost that battle (I use CC for most purchases), I might as well get some benefits out of it.
My CC company doesn't offer me any fancy spending tracking, and I don't trust companies like mint.com as much as I trust google to deal with my data (and I'm not sure if Mint works outside of the US).
Silliness aside its the mistakes which are more scary than big brother actually watching, because theres just to many people to watch... but its real easy to make a mistake.
My favourite take on this scenario is the movie Brazil, the long and short of it is a guy gets pinned for a crime he didn't commit thanks to a bureaucracy error. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
Without a record of when you purchased the roll of carpet and the shovel, you'd have a much harder time selling that story.
And thanks...now I'm getting a little paranoid wondering if that time I decided I needed an area rug at 2 AM and so went to an all-night Walmart is ever going to come back and hurt me.
Off the top of my head the big advantage to Google is the ability to track behaviour patterns before spending (and match them to similar patterns that didn't result in a purchase and look to modify that behaviour).
While I don't think that's a big deal, I also don't see the benefit to me in giving it to Google. Maybe that will change when I see the full service offering but from what I know at the moment this feels like I have a potential loss (privacy) and little or no potential gain.
On that assessment I wouldn't go near it.
You buy a Casio watch, a camping knife and a plane ticket to New York on September the 11th 2021 [1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guantanamo_Bay_detainee...
As an extreme example, imagine using just random data. Any pattern you look for will occur sooner or later in pure random data. The rarity of the pattern is offset by the amount of data you generate. More data -> more patterns. That doesn't mean the incidence of the real thing increased at all.
Anything which is self-detrimental is likely to be part of the signal, not the noise.