Excellent point. I'm way more creeped out about some shadowy corporate spook digging through my photos, but I'm way more likely to actually be materially disadvantaged by $search_company analysing my search terms, realising I'm really REALLY interested in buying [X], and quietly dropping from their results any mention of [X] vendors who haven't paid at least $y for advertising this quarter (including, most likely, my best deals for [X]).
And if you zoom out and watch the impact of privacy violations on a state level?
Privacy violation is power. And all power that isn‘t elected should be limited by those who are, so we can shape our future. The way things are now companies like facebook or google could easily threaten any elected leader with annihilation simply by using the gathered data and sending the right messages to the right people. They wouldn’t even have to use fake news for that.
Privacy never really was a individual problem, it is a systemic one.
This is the crux of it. Life is an asymmetric-information game, and the person with the most information (and the most ability to process that information) always wins. Any discussion of why privacy violation matters always comes down to this: The more your adversary knows about you, the weaker your bargaining position.
