How would you explain the cost to someone? Most of the discourse seems to boil down to some mix of "it's creepy" and "it could be used for a nefarious purpose", which is not super convincing.
For most commercial surveillance, I can't. Provable harm from the Equifax breach remains unquantified. We're only beginning to discuss those data for e.g. Facebook and teenagers. To give analogy, we're in the 1960s on the smoking-regulation timeline [1].
Legislators made it far worse because they demanded additional data to be saved for "security purposes". So not even here people are informed about the problem. On the contrary, we regularly have old farts making everything much worse.
Frankly, those that believe they can save some bucks when they share their data probably aren't the best to understand the larger picture. The data is valuable for different purposes but it is also difficult to put a price tag on it.
It is very concrete, but that would automatically alienate quite a few people...
There were a lot of people in the data set, certainly, but how many can quantify damages?
If anything the Cambridge Analytica scandal was (disturbing) "win" for privacy loss: a lot of the Cambridge Analytica demographics markers were baked into the Facebook ad platform and became standard ad demographics soon after. The Cambridge Analytica scandal as played out looked like Facebook was stamping out bad privacy practices using its platform, but the real message was Facebook eliminating a competitor to their ad business by eliminating their access to Facebook's data. Lucky for Facebook the PR mostly stuck with the face value of "stamping out bad privacy practices", but even a lot of the people that saw/realized it was simply Facebook eliminating a competitor have mostly shrugged and continued to use Facebook (though Facebook did add some opt-outs at that much more modest uproar, versus all the loud thundering noise Cambridge Analytica got).
IIRC, the Trump used that data set to send targeted ads to ~90M independent and republican voters. Independents got ads attacking Clinton and emphasizing prominent Trump supporters. Republicans got turnout-oriented ads.
Provided he won by less than 100k votes (and lost the popular vote), the cost to the median US citizen was likely quite large.
I didn’t know the same demographic markers had been baked into the platform. This is very concerning.
Certainly they cross-compiled that data with other ad systems and phone lists and who knows what else, but given the scandal with respect to that specific campaign was primarily about their micro-targeted Facebook ad buys, Facebook is still left culpable as the platform owner at the end of the day.
But I'm of the belief that micro-targeted ads should be illegal in general, and all of the micro-targeting enabling ad platforms seriously questioned for what they've enabled in the last decade or so. The fact that they are generally acceptable and multi-billion dollar revenue generators is its own reminder of what this thread is about that the average person doesn't seem to care about all of these invasive data privacy issues.
> the average person doesn't seem to care about all of these invasive data privacy issues.
I know, anecdotally, I became half a pariah in my family for refusing to register and share pics of my kids on WhatsApp. That was after the FB purchase, but before they changed the terms of service. I didn't trust FB, and was ultimately proven right.