If you ‘sell your privacy’ to them, than you give up control over how your data is used. Nobody can tell you how it may be used in the future, or all the ways it is being exploited right now, because once they’ve collected the data, we don’t have control over or insight into how it is used, and we have no gaurantees about the future. What we can know is some but not all of the ways that your personal data is currently being exploited.
- Influencing your behavior and manipulating you, two common examples:
- Targeted advertising: using knowledge about you, your psychology, and your behaviors, fears, hopes, self image, to get you to buy things you wouldn’t have otherwise.
- Political propaganda and micro-targeting. Same as targeted advertising except the goal is to influence your politics, voting patterns, likelihood of voting, etc. An example of this would be the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016.
- Feeding toxic algorithms, the more information you give about yourself and your behaviors to big tech (especially social media) companies, the more you help them to manipulate you. I don’t mean manipulate in some sinister, conspiratorial way, I mean social algorithms have one goal, to capture as much of your attention as possible for as long as possible, more often than not the way they keep that attention is manipulative and toxic and at odds with having a healthy life. Things that make you feel angry, righteous, superior, correct, victimized, or outraged keep our attention longer.
- skewing your awareness of reality one way that algorithms keep your attention is by reflecting back to you what you want to hear. An algorithm is generally indifferent to what is accurate or constructive or healthy. Algorithms will often just reflect back to you what they know or think you want to hear. This has the effect of creating an invisible bubble or echo chamber, in a way that can give people a really skewed image of reality, what’s widely believed, or what’s popular. If we are constantly fed news articles and social media content that reflects and reinforces our point of view, it skews our realities.
- Lack of privacy creates a chilling affect on freedom of expression and open dialogue. Many studies have shown that when people understand what they say or write is not private or is being recorded/monitored. Apart from the obvious personal benefits of freedom of expression, its something that is extremely important for society and for democracy.
- Training AI, etc
- Unintended consequences. If you put all of your eggs into a single big-tech basket, you are completely dependent on them and vulnerable to their decisions. Recall the guy who’s Google account was terminated and who was reported to the police for CSAM after he sent a medically relevant photo of his child to the child’s pediatrician. Police investigated, and not only found no wrongdoing but actually went as far as trying to help the guy regain access to his account and telling Google the guy was cleared of wrongdoing, Google inexplicably refused to reverse the ban even when the police got involved. This guys account had all his photos, emails, etc over more than a decade, he lost all of that after a single mistake by Google.
But the main point I want to reinforce, is that the above examples are not the point. Those are just a few examples of ways that we know with certainty our data and privacy is being exploited today but once you hand over control you have no control over how that data gets used in the future. Google’s (as an example) privacy policy is meant to be difficult to understand but one place where it is quite clear is that there are very few limitations on how they may use your data, its like a blank check.