(sorry, haven’t read the intermediate stuff, just replying to a point)
What exactly do you think your Tesco clubcard actually does?
I don’t have one. And, though trite, that’s an important difference: I can walk into Tesco and buy a tin of beans and walk out again without permitting them to know my exact location at the point in time at which I consume the beans. And without letting them have access to photos of, say, my kids in the bath.
Whereas with most apps I can’t do that. I don’t get the choice to say “actually, all I want is a tin of beans, so you don’t need access to all my stuff.”
And even if I did have a Clubcard, as far as I’m aware it’d only capture information about what I purchased, from where, and when. Obviously Tesco would have my address and some other details so all this information could be used to build general pictures of its consumer base, as well as specific ones about my purchasing patterns, but they wouldn’t be able to know where I was, or whom I associated with, or what I took photos of.
And the contacts access is super powerful if you want to do some neat analysis. Once you’ve got that, you can start building some interesting global social networks. Throw virtually any metadata on top of that and you can start doing some really fun things. Location data is pretty high on the fun list.
Now, of course, Spotify is probably just doing benign stuff. But people get hacked. And whatever you think of stuff that appears on Wikileaks, it’s not hard to see that some entities are going to be keen to get their hands on this sort of data (whether they can or will are of course different questions). Plus it just adds to the whole idea that to consume digital stuff you need to expose a whole raft of personal information. I’m sure we’ve all installed an app at some time where we’ve thought, “I wonder why it needs to access that?—ah, what the hell”. It’s a nice little softener for the one time you install an app that does do something you’d rather it didn’t.
So, no, I’ve never really wondered what my non-existent Clubcard does, because it doesn’t know where I am, can’t see my photos, doesn’t have internet access, and knows nothing of my social network. The data isn’t of much interest to anyone other than Tesco, and even Tesco let me use their services without having one.
A phone and its apps, though, are quite a different matter.
