My personal wariness about privacy has to do with having so much information about me being collected in one place. Corporate security measures have not been sufficient at many companies so I don’t really trust companies to do a good job with identifiable data collection. At least with credit card companies, if you have been hit with fraud, the card companies limit the damage. In contrast, companies like Google and Facebook are not guaranteeing anything. And as a result, I do very little with my smart phone so there is less to track. For example, I don’t use location-based apps. I won’t log on to Facebook via mobile.

And I have been pulling off info from Facebook each time they change what they do with the data. There have been blatant abuses with Facebook and my account, so I don’t trust the company in the least. (For example, asking me for my mobile phone number as a security protection and then publishing it in my contact info without my permission.)

What you end up with, when users start to doubt the safety of the system, is that people begin changing how they use it, thereby bringing it all down eventually.
More Facebook users are hiding their friends to protect themselves | Internet privacy – InfoWorld

People are thinking about the Internet as a public utility these days. While one can argue about why they shouldn’t be concerned about privacy, if they perceive the Internet as a commons area, they want to establish how the commons can be run. While companies may want to gather info, the perceived value to consumers isn’t so high. The “people’s Internet” doesn’t “need” so much data collection.

although i disagree with the changes Google have implemented, why is Viviane Redding unhappy about this but not worried about peoples data being given out freely, based only on an accusation of copyright infringement, to the entertainment industries?

Europe has always had stricter laws about data collection than the US. So companies have had to modify their policies to do business in Europe. This isn’t really a new thing. But the scope of Google’s data collection (the many different ways it can collect data and then put it altogether to create profiles of people) especially puts it on the radar. That’s what happens when companies want to work their way into people’s lives at every level and then want to monetize that ubiquitousness. That’s why I have a huge problem with Facebook’s goals and refuse to play along. I won’t run all my web activities through Facebook, though the company keeps trying to find ways to encourage people to do that.

I didn’t sign up for Google+ because I was unsure of Google’s privacy policies for that, and now I am glad I didn’t. As data collection becomes more aggressive, I am modifying my web usage.

Between companies wanting to create massive files on you, and hackers continuing to find ways to break into servers, it does make you want to retreat and live as much of your life off-line as possible so it isn’t all up for grabs.

Yes, we’ve lived with cookies for a long time, but when they started, the pitch was, “We’ve just linked it to your machine, not to you personally.” Now, there’s no pretense that this data collection is anonymous. Companies want to know every detail of your life: what you buy, where you go, who you know, etc. And the benefits returned aren’t always that useful to you. In fact, if anything, it just becomes a way to bombard you with more commercial messages that you’ll probably not want. If you aren’t buying (either because you are trying to save money or because you want to consume less), then you don’t want messages about buying no matter how targeted they are.