Nealglover wrote:
So I asked (a genuine question) what those reasons might be, because I honestly couldn’t think of any.
So far nobody has really got any.
Apart from just the generic “being against big companies making money” obviously.
I’d already written:
I guess I was thinking about countries where people can get into fairly serious trouble for researching subjects disapproved of by regime leaders. Not saying that companies such as Google sell info that could get people arrested, but if you store all that data there exists the possibility it could be hacked and used to persecute people.
Ok, here’s a simple example: Syria. All conspiracy theories aside, the Assad regime is trying to stop information getting out of the country because there is a lot of horrific stuff happening (use of chemical weapons, indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas). Information is getting out, via sites such as Twitter, Youtube and GMail accounts. The Assad regime has not fallen, he could conceivably make up with the rest of the world, rebuild a few towns, splash some oil money around and say it was all a misunderstanding. What if he then gets hold of the information to find out who uploaded video footage of his army killing civilians?
There are less dramatic examples, and plenty of behavioural studies of life within a panopticon, where privacy is impossible. The popular phrase “those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear” has been amply discredited by people far better at explaining things than me.