And what do you propose Microsoft or Apple would do with the knowledge that I'm an alcoholic who is cheating on my wife? Why would they care? They're in business to make money, and there's not much money in extortion, not for long. If my phone called my wife automatically to tell her where I was and what I was doing, it wouldn't be long before no one bought that phone and Apple went out of business from the privacy lawsuits.
Yeah, we carry devices that are spying on us. Why do they spy? To sell us more stuff. They don't try to hide that fact. Your fearmongering is off topic here, and fairly irrelevant elsewhere too.
They spy because they can. They spy because the companies involved believe that the data they collect has value. They spy because the companies involved believe that the data they collect might have even more value in the future.
The companies involved aren't in the business of selling you stuff. They sell data about you to others. Sure that might be a retailer of Hello Kitty backpacks with scenes of unicorns shitting rainbows. It might be a presidential campaign. It might be a government - and in that case, the value exchanged might be trade privileges rather than cash.
Large commercial ventures willing to harm many people for the sake of profit are not unknown to history e.g. the East India Company and International Association of the Congo. Likewise, industries adopting standard practices which do so - e.g. tetra-ethyl lead.
I may be wrong. But I don't think that just because I live in the US corporations have any more respect for my human dignity than they do for the citizens of Honduras or Pakistan or Albania.
Not wrong at all, understated if anything. The Harvard Business Review highlighted Big Data a few issues ago, and public interest groups like EPIC and the EFF are on this full time. It doesn't take much reading from those sources or the many others to see how valuable big data i.e., spying, can be. Just follow the money.
They will make money from your data regardless of whether it "outs" you to your wife or not. They have no respect for your privacy which means they will sell out some of their userbase (or other people they happen to have data on) if it will make them money.
Secret formulas deciding our credit limits and insurance premiums because spying gives them information is the problem. Not the information that we might pay more for a hotel room.
One big reason they spy because there are a lot of webdevs who either have no idea or do not care about PII. Why would someone put a link on their website, to Facebook or Twitter for example, basically giving them all of their extremely valuable web logs for free? These companies make big bucks from those unnecessary "live links" and go to great lengths to avoid questions about why they "need" to be live (and they don't).
Yeah, we carry devices that are spying on us. Why do they spy? To sell us more stuff. They don't try to hide that fact. Your fearmongering is off topic here, and fairly irrelevant elsewhere too.