Thanks you, I had to scroll down a fair bit to see someone point this out.

I am with you, I wouldn't wear one if they paid me. The data they are harvesting is a lot more valuable than the service they are providing.

I am sure health insurance companies are salivating at the opportunity to buy this data. Even if the data is anonymous.

I guess that is a concern about pretty much every service and device out there including a phone.

Can I assume you don't own a smartphone, then?

Of course not. I own a phone, whose battery lasts a month, I can call people and receive text messages. And its common knowledge that its not a good idea to bring any mobile device to demonstrations for example. In Germany they've been known to indiscriminately monitor all mobile communications at demonstrations and put the numbers on file.

Your communications can still be tapped, your location can still be tracked through cell towers, and remote malware can still turn your phone into a persistent bug.

I don't think there's much of an advantage to using a dumb phone. At least with a smartphone you can run apps that encrypt your communications.

if you have the smart-phone that it is compatible with, they probably already have most of the information anyways

I'll be happy to share my data with Microsoft or NSA for that matter, I'm pretty sure nobody there cares how I spend my days, and I don't think they're interested in your days either...

Well western governments are experts in keeping their population docile and politically disinterested. So I'm not surprised a growing percentage of their population is fine with being monitored and spied on. The majority of the population might not really need protection from the state, but the few that do, dissidents, political activists definitely do.

By establishing a culture, where people are happy to share their data with the government anyone who isn't will automatically be a suspect. For example people who use TOR are put on a list. I don't know what live you lived, but some of my friends were under police surveillance (some police officer lived as a student for several years before his cover was blown by an acquaintance) because the government thought they had to keep taps on far left student organisations. Considering how much effort they went through to do that, I'm sure they monitor much more benign activity electronically.

>because the government thought they had to keep taps on far left student organisations.

That's a perfectly sensible thing to do. I would do the same thing. Any enlightened person would do it.

I agree but there are different ways of going about it. In the particular case I know of, a police officer infiltrated all left leaning student organisations in order to get access to the more radical ones. By infiltrated I mean that he went to their meetings, was invited to parties and reported all their personal information. In any case, I just wanted to defuse the argument that the government is probably not that interested in your data. Its far easier to turn devices such as this against you, I mentioned the case where they recorded the phone numbers of every mobile device at a largely peaceful demonstration. Since there is no reason to ever delete this data, you not only have to trust that the current government is benevolent and reasonable, but also that this form of government is stable, does not crumble and you don't end up on a kill list 20 years later. This might not be an issue in the West, but there are countless cases around the world, where based on much less information political activists / dissidents were murdered.

I'm not a proponent of this unsupervised mass data collection. I wanted to point out that your example is an especially counter-productive one.

Earlier this month Glenn Greenwald gave an excellent talk on "Why privacy matters" that maybe might convince you that your privacy actually is important: http://www.ted.com/talks/glenn_greenwald_why_privacy_matters