It's kind of related to that old software adage: There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.
There are two ways to protect your privacy. One is to tell people absolutely nothing about yourself. This way requires constant vigilance. The other is tell people everything about yourself and then make up some stuff. Pretty soon people won't be able to distinguish between noise and signal.
People suck at randomizing things and computers are stupidly good a processing huge amounts of data and recovering the signal from the noise. The solution is not to add noise, but to remove signal. Generally adding noise is the first thing laypeople think of. Too bad there's whole fields of signal analysis, information theory, noise modeling, and the persistence of side-channels with over a century of work that make plucking the weak signal from noise relatively easy. Oh, and did I mention they have COMPUTERS?
You don't have to be perfect, just more effort than it's worth.
I think my main point here is not only is there too much data. But that the reason for too much data is most of it is fluff data no one gives a shit about.
That's the key. Your data and my data is the fluff. Nobody cares for it. Amazon doesn't give a flying shit about you. You're not important. At best you data is analyzed by an algorithm and you're served the relevant ads. Oooh shit big deal.
Should probably correct this to: ...and the analysis yields a personality model that helps best manipulate you
That it is currently being used for relevant ads is just one outcome, incidentally also an attempt at manipulating you, but that's more my disdain for the ad industry talking.