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 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.