Additionally, they regularly turn such data over to government snoops, without due process or probable cause, something that storing your data with them enables. This is a terrible thing for a free society even if you don't yourself personally care for or value privacy, as you opt in everyone who corresponds with you without their consent by using these systems.
I have nothing nice to say about google, so I'm not defending them, but didn't they announce our email is not getting scanned any more? Given that they reversed the do-no-evil motto, the sad part is that I guess they have enough information about us not to bother reading our emails.
There is nothing dangerous with being shown more relevant ads.
However, the collected data create an intimate, detailed portrait of you. Data aggregators can know how old you are, your general state of health, where you have been, your interests, including sexual interests, your political views both expressed and unexpressed, your associations, your associates, your family, your daily habits, your unusual habits, your credit score, whether that credit score is accurate, etc, etc.
And, this is true for everyone you come into contact with: friends, family, business associates.
An AI could, with this data, model you and your behavior more accurately than could your own spouse.
Moreover, not only must you trust the people with access to that data, and everyone they sell it to, to only ever use it for targeted ads, but you must trust everyone who will ever have access to it, forever.
While you may believe you're boring and your views are entirely uncontroversial, times change. Or, hell, with enough data and motivation, someone can paint a damning portrait of you made up whole cloth from true, innocuous details.
You have to just hope that neither you nor anyone you associate with become a political target, or the target of criminal activity, or garner just plain negative attention, for whatever reason, because if so, you and your loved ones will be trivially easy to find and manipulate.
To me this is a natural thing. It makes sense that computers are better at remembering and interpreting data than humans. YouTube is able to recommend me videos much better than I could myself. I don't remember the names of all the people I like, but YouTube does.
This is a true statement that doesn't address any of the arguments; a non-sequitur. Yes, computers are better at remembering and interpreting (some) data than humans.
What does that have to do with the humans who access and use that data for their own, very human ends? You skipped that part.
> It’s astonishing how quickly a silly hat becomes literal violent propaganda. I mean, in the same minute.
I keep forgetting that “the cloud” just means “a computer that belongs to someone else, that they can take back at any time”