&gt; <i>The question is - what&#x27;s the price?</i><p>I am familiar with the tech world and I keep asking myself this question too. From what I see now, all the data that Facebook collects can hurt me in two ways: more insidious ads, and when used by a superhuman-level AI to infer pretty much anything about me. The AI doesn&#x27;t seem on the horizon, and the ads don&#x27;t seem to be that harmful, they&#x27;re only annoying. There&#x27;s of course an angle of a dystopian totalitarian government, but in that case we&#x27;re all screwed anyway; data collected by Facebook or Google will make little difference.<p>Then there&#x27;s an insurance angle, but here I have mixed feelings - it seems to me that it&#x27;s better for an insurer to know more (I for one would like car insurance companies to have real-time centimeter precision location data about every driver, that could restore some sanity on the roads), but not too much. I don&#x27;t know where I stand on this yet.<p>Anyway; the way I see it, this whole data-selling business model works mostly because advertisers are <i>stupid enough</i> (or rather, in so tight a competition) to pay for data that won&#x27;t give them much edge anyway. In a way, it&#x27;s not users that are the victims here, it&#x27;s the advertisers.