- Governments and companies are building massive databases of personal information on an unprecedented scale, reminiscent of surveillance practices that were previously unacceptable due to historical experiences like WWII and the Stasi.
- Proposals like mandatory chat monitoring for child pornography ('chat control') and expanded surveillance powers for intelligence agencies are being pushed forward, often with commercial interests from the AI industry.
- A vast array of data is now routinely stored: location history, financial transactions, medical records, social media activity, communications, emails, search queries, government interactions, utility usage, car tracking, and even familial DNA data.
- Authorities have extensive legal access to this data, while individuals do not, creating a significant asymmetry that can be used to build damaging narratives against people.
- An example illustrates how innocuous data points (e.g., an angry text, a dental bill, a payment to a known scammer, a photo at the scene, a DNA match) can be arbitrarily combined to implicate someone, forcing them to spend enormous effort explaining each item.
- The UWV case shows that governments already use data like cookies to monitor benefit recipients, threatening their livelihoods based on incomplete evidence.
- Governments actively use collected data for profiling and algorithmic decision-making, making these theoretical risks very real.
- The core argument: even if you think you have nothing to hide, the growing mountain of data means you will have more and more to explain when questioned, making it imperative to be critical of any further data expansion.