No it isn't. It's the difference between "Here's some money, please show this to young Democrats" and "Here's some money, please give me a list of young Democrats." That's a pretty damn big difference.
There's certainly a difference. I'm not sure it's a very big one though.
The latter is an extra problem in a few specific areas:
1. your foremost fear is a bad actor getting your private details (e.g. identity fraud / doxing). These are legitimate fears, but certainly not a primary likelihood in the majority of cases.
2. discrimination based on background checks (jobs/loans/etc.). Also completely legitimate, though background checks tend to be plenty invasive in isolation these days anyway, so I'm not sure how much of a negative impact Google's data would potentially add here.
Other than these specific threats, the two seem exactly equivalent for most reasons people are concerned about privacy.
Well, that's pretty much my problem. The only reasons I can think of would pretty much be the two you've already listed (and explicitly said it's not equivalent for those purposes).
This isn't some gotcha thing, I'm trying to understand these concerns better, because I really don't. I'm not asking for "counter-examples" to anything, I'm just asking for examples. It's not an odd question.
Ah, ok, apologies; I didn't realise those two items I listed were your only reasons.
The main reasons people are concerned for privacy, I would say, are around influence and personal autonomy. There are plenty of people (many of them on HN, I've read many comments here to this effect), who want to cede decision-making about their own consumption to service-providers. There is an attractive convenience to this. Privacy advocates are typically not these people, and are concerned not just for their own individual autonomy, but also often motivated by broader societal concerns like those discussed by Pariser (obviously a hot topic right now w.r.t. Trump and Putin), as well as less-political aspects of selective exposure theory around societal trends.
I'm concerned about privacy insofar as the information collected can be used to used to hurt or oppress me or others. Using it to target advertising doesn't rise to that level. To the extent that advertising itself is acceptable (and there's a legitimate debate there), targeted advertising seems to be a benign use of personal data.
The main problem I see is that corporations cannot be trusted to limit their use of personal data to benign purposes, nor can they be trusted to keep that data safe from people who will abuse it. But there's certainly a significant difference between potentially leaking or abusing data and actively selling it.
>targeted advertising seems to be a benign use of personal data.
How you define benign? let me give you a real example,
A woman got pregnant, she probably did some web searches related to the situation. Then something bad happened, the pregnancy was lost but the woman continued to get ads related to the baby for months(or even more).
There is no button somewhere where you click and all ad networks can clear your history, your data is stored forever and sold or traded.
The line blurs a bit when it's "Here's some money, please show this specific link with a bunch of tracking methods to young Democrats in a 50 mile radius of <city> who recently bought a car and have a credit card balance >$10k".
If you're referring to Cambridge Analytica with your Facebook example, Google have provided APIs for 3rd-parties to access private user data for many of it's services, just as Facebook did with Cambridge Analytica. For example, the G Suite Marketplace lets many companies read all of your emails.
Both require an auth consent screen with permissions listed, where it may or may not be clear to the user what's being shared.
Only a few thousand people clicked through consent pages to share data specifically with the Cambridge professor who shared data with Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's APIs allowed that professor to then get data about those users' friends, who never made an agreement with that professor. Facebook has since shut down that API. https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/
The deal could not be good enough, because the liability for breaking their own privacy policy would probably be much larger, not to mention the loss of user trust. Even Facebook does not sell the list.
If you target an ad to young Democrats, and they click on it and buy the advertised product, then you know that they are young Democrats, and you'll have their personal information.
