This is just another instance of the same old discussion. Many things are perfectly okay on an individual basis. E.g. individual citizens can see my license plate, and this is fine. But when it gets correlated into a picture that effectively tracks where I go, now we're talking about something different entirely.
I agree and think it's weird how often I see variations of that general argument here; where someone says, "Normal thing A is fine, therefore it must be fine if we scale it by a factor of 100,000,000". Scale matters!
where someone says, "Normal thing A is fine, therefore it must be fine if we scale it by a factor of 100,000,000"
Why are we to assume that it isn't fine just because there's more of it?
Scale matters!
For all the "scale matters!" in this topic, no one seems to be able to articulate why. Were laws broken? Hell, were unspoken rules broken? What is $BAD_THING that will happen if $X "at scale!"? But instead what I read are broken analogies that don't stand up to scrutiny.
The fallacy isn't that scale is inherently bad or anything but that scale can change the fundamental nature of what a thing is and so they're not always able to be substituted.
* If I kill an Armenian it's murder, if I kill every Armenian it's genocide.
* If I buy some shares of Google it's investing, if I buy every share of Google it's a takeover.
* If I happen to know where you are because a saw you in town it's a coincidence. If I know where you are 24/7 it's surveillance.
* If a friend sends my address to someone it's no big deal. If they post my address publicly it's doxxing.
The logic "if I can X at some scale then I can do X at any scale" doesn't follow because doing X at different scales might be totally different things. I don't think Google slurping up SSIDs is going to make $bad_thing happen but the justification for them doing the sluping is more complicated than "well it's fine if I wrote down one SSID..."
