It always amazing me how may cave dwellers we have on these "Tech" forums.
OMG it's listening to me.
OMG it's looking at me.
Firstly, it's amazing you think you are THAT interesting to anyone.
Hey, you have either a Penis or a Vagina as roughly 50/50 of the population do.
You may pick your nose, fart, scratch your nuts, get drunk.
Sorry, but that's not exactly going to set the world alight.
Can you imagine these people in a future Star Trek and Commander Data?
OMG he can see me, he must be spying, he can hear me, he must be listening, OMG and he can move around.
I will sit here motionless at any time Commander Data is in the room.
Wow, Paranoid much.
Ok, if you think we're all being paranoid just by being concerned about privacy, then how about you set the example. You take down all the curtains and blinds in your house, leave the lights on all night, and walk around naked 24/7. Take the doors off your bathrooms, and while you're at it, set up some cameras in there and in your bedroom, and send the output to some 80 inch screens posted around the outside of your place. Tell us how that works for you.
With that little satirical aside done and posted, maybe I can give you a bit of light about our concerns.
Its common for people to pick out and defeat exceedingly ridiculous concepts, your "penis/vagina" example being a very solid representation of that. You may be too busy building easily knocked-down straw constructs to see reason, but I can try explaining this nonetheless.
Any individual data point seems ridiculous to consider from a privacy standpoint, because of course it is. Especially the longer you consider it on its own, just like when you were a child and you played the game where you said the same word over and over until it lost its meaning and seemed like nonsense. You may bring up nudity in this context, other times you may bring up the setting on your thermostat, still other times the page you're looking at on CNN or whatever. The bills you pay online, the places you buy gas on your debit card, the number of times you get coffee and ring up stars on that pretty gold card - its all irrelevant and ridiculous, isn't it? The privacy concern doesn't deal with any particular thing, because in a closeup, every example seems ridiculous. But consider this illustration:
You take a box of ball bearings and scatter it on a pool table. With your nose about a foot from the pool table you look around using your peripheral vision and you decide that the scattering looks completely random. Then you climb a ladder and look down from the 10 foot ceiling at the pool table. Now you can see little patterns. You might see half a smiley-face, or a plus sign, whatever. Yes, you're doing what the ancients did when they established the odd constellations of our night sky. But you're still seeing patterns, whether they're true representations or projections of your psyche on your observations. For the purpose of this discussion, either reasoning works.
Now you extend the pool table out infinitely in all directions, and you use an infinite number of ball bearings. And hell, for the purposes of this discussion, you have perfect eyesight from any distance. Because I said so. From your height, you can see patterns upon patterns upon patterns. The higher you go, the more ball bearings you can see, and therefore more patterns. You'll see smaller patterns form pieces of larger patterns as you go higher.
That table surface is the net, and the ball bearings are the digital components of your life. The more you add data, and the bigger the picture, the more patterns are seen, and the more is known about what goes on between your ears.
The concern that privacy advocates have doesn't deal with any particular thing, even though privacy concerns manifest at the introduction of the tools to know each particular thing. The true concern deals with pattern recognition and the introduction of tools that can be used for that recognition, whether the patterns can be either real or perceived. Either mode is just as dangerous, with the perceived one just a little more scary than the real one.
Those algorithms that I've been trying to get people here to understand, well, those algorithms don't sleep, they never stop working, and they might just be a little wronger than they are right. If they are right, they know everything you have done - and why. And they will employ that knowledge to make sure they anticipate your wants. Maybe even influence them. If they're wrong, hoo boy. Think of the time you tried to explain yourself to someone you were in trouble with. Maybe your third grade teacher when they found all those pictures of penises and vaginas you had in your Trapper Keeper. "NO! Its not obscene! I wasn't drawing dirty things! I was illustrating how we all have one or the other, in anticipation of an argument I will have twenty years from now!" You knew you were right, but they "knew" otherwise. Because they'd been watching you for some time and felt they had a perfect handle on your mindset, based on everything they'd ever seen you do, plus the physical data they had on you. You were convicted by pattern perception. It didn't feel good, did it?
(Lots of people like to use straw men to reinforce a shaky argument, while I prefer to illustrate with satire, which serves the dual purpose of exposing a shaky position all the while illuminating my own point. Take it or leave it. )
"What are you worried about?" isn't the appropriate question to ask us when we're talking about potential privacy concerns. By doing so you're avoiding critical thought. You've taken a side already and you're asking us to defend a position rather than to consider it for yourself. The correct question should be "how might this go wrong?"
Its not my job to convince you of the potential loss of liberty that products like this can cause. My own personal objections to technology doesn't come from eco-facism or, as your "cave dweller" comment might presuppose, ludditism. As a child I looked forward greatly to the things I saw in media ranging from Star Trek to Popular Science. However, as time passed, I became acutely aware of the loss of personal freedom these things can cause if not implemented with an eye towards that freedom. My objection isn't to the approach of inevitable future tech, but to the loss of the individual, entrepreneurial spirit that made that future tech possible.
I recently read the comments under a TED talk, where a futurist had given a speech on privacy in the future. One of the commenters said something extremely chilling: he felt that true progress wasn't possible until privacy was completely eliminated. He said that all of our lies and fronts cause delays in cooperation and wasting of resources. We can only truly progress "as a society" once all those privacy barriers are eliminated. The usual tired tropes of "full equality" were on full display. I can't decide if I was more repelled by his flawed reasoning or by the several posters below his comment who agreed with him. I find myself chilled to the marrow to think of a world where the loss of privacy is absolute, where everyone has access to every physical marker and every thought of every person alive. Where no political system is even needed because no one can have thoughts that deviate from "the norm".
For some reason, as the pace of technology accelerates, the loss of human individual identity is portrayed as some kind of desirable thing. The egalitarian argument carried out to its full synthetic end means that all of us must be completely identical, and striving for the whole. Like an ant colony. I won't be part of that. My idea of peace is not to have complete conformity, but rather to have complete individualism. Where anyone can do what they please with their own property (including their own body) as long as it doesn't cross over, uninvited, into their neighbor's yard.
YMMV.
