You're kind of proving my point.

- Your first link is about the unroll.me debacle. Perfect example to me of a completely overblown story. They used receipt data to produce an anonymized sum (probably broken down by things like region, etc) of total ride-sharing spend, which they sold to Uber. I guess that kinda sucks for Lyft if they weren't expecting Uber to have such an easy time getting at that number, but it's hardly destructive. In most other industries, there are dozens of well-respected, very rich firms who's whole job it is to use similar tricks to estimate market share, Nielsen being the best example. Is Uber getting Lyft's numbers this way really that different from Wal-Mart getting Target's numbers by getting Nielsen to pay shoppers to scan their Target purchases and give that data to them? (That's called the Nielsen HomeScan Program, by the way). I understand that HomeScan users are volunteering for this in a more explicit way than unroll.me users are, but again, this is a philosophical distinction. Absolutely 0 harm was done to me as an unroll.me user by them giving Uber this number.

- Your second link is the one good argument that I already acknowledged. The insurance industry is 100% built around developing a good statistical model of risk so they can price premiums appropriately for that risk. Nobody bats an eye that insurance rates are different for women vs men, which is after all a genetic difference like the ones in the article. The only difference is that it's an obvious one. It's a complicated question and I can see why this is a good question for courts to consider, but it's not a foregone conclusion to me that insurance companies shouldn't be able to factor these things into their models. Either way, 99.99% of the things people on HN (or in this thread) complain about with regards to privacy has nothing to do with your genome.

- Your other mess of points are all movie-plot conspiracies that are already illegal in other ways. This doesn't convince me at all. I'm not seriously weighing the risk of some international political scandal being played out with me as the scapegoat as a result of Facebook knowing what movies I like. Neither will the vast majority of people. This does not make them irrational.

You're raising excellent points, but I doubt you'll get a satisfactory explanation here.

My brother does digital advertising for a living, whereas I have an opaque sticker on my front webcam. We come from opposite ends of the privacy spectrum, and talk about this issue every so often. And yet, I've never succeeded in convincing him that lack of privacy online will impact him personally. The reason for that is that it probably won't. He's savvy enough, like most people, to keep his accounts private to random Google searches of him. But he uses FB, snapchat, instagram, and all of them heavily. Ultimately, I'm forced to admit that being in touch with friends on FB adds value to his life. The fact that I personally don't care for that doesn't mean he doesn't or shouldn't, and for him, the trade-offs are completely acceptable.

Those who aren't savvy (or rich/powerful) enough are those who would be impacted more by lack of privacy - even if the mechanism for lack of privacy is the user's own lack of understanding of what not to post online or how to control apps' privacy settings. COPPA Restrictions are a good example of important functional control of data privacy for those who aren't full-on techies (like children).