It’s a company of less than 10. I’d just be fired.

These are all things that would need to be individually tracked down or requested and in government-controlled databases. It’s not just the government that has that data now. It’s the camera manufacturer and their 800 partners. And it’s all in one place.

It’s data that individually may not be important to you specifically, but combined, that’s enough information to easily start manipulating you, whether it’s directly or through advertising.

It’s not just about what data is collected, but also who has access.

Where he lives: DMV and taxes cover that What he looks like: DMV covers that How many devices are on the network: The vast majority of people have no reason to care about that. Hell. I am not even sure I are about that How many kids he has and their ages: Taxes and social security

When people ask me 'are you hiding from the government' it's almost hilarious to me. I pay local taxes on property, I send the government tax forms every year, I vote prolifically in local and national elections. I have a calling and letter writing 'campaign' for my representatives to know just how much they are screwing up. I go to protests. If I were a person of interest, they'd come visit.

However, there is no requirement to overshare with anyone, and that's where I am. I am not 'hiding' from anyone. I'm just pretty stingy with my data. Now, I realize there are some who must hide from their government, but to date, that's not really in my threat model.

Most of those things you mentioned are government databases, not public knowledge.

I get your point, but the fact that the data is available elsewhere isn't really an argument for allowing another vector to collect the data (and also cross verify it).

There's more of an argument if there's not really another choice, say buying a new car that doesn't collect data isn't really an option since they all do it on some level. You either buy a car or not.

But cameras there are options that are not cloud based. Safemo is probably the best comparable product to other WiFi cameras, and then there's any NVR system. You can accomplish the same thing without much sacrifice or compromise.

Then there's the its "fine" today but tomorrow things change... Like Ring now feeding images to Flock and their surveillance/facial recognition system.

So no, its not quite okay that "they already have my data from other places so it doesn't matter"

I have plenty of things to hide BUT nobody cares about my opinion, after signing up my life to Uncle Sam.

Like you would unfortunately expect. “I don’t care if they know that stuff.”

They are paid by advertisers that want to sell you things and ideas. Google and Meta's job is to keep you on their platform as long as possible so you can be served more advertisements. And to keep you dependent on their free platform to gather more data about what you like and your behavior patterns to easily influence and predict what advertisements grab your interest.

And because they have the data on you to know exactly who you are and what you may like, it's valuable for advertisers because they know their cat litter advertisement is going to be shown to someone who very obviously has a cat through all their activities and interactions on the platform.

To be honest, since I have adblock I find it hard to understand too. How can that make so much money? But all the current richest companies and people built their empire on private data right? Google, Facebook, elon musk and so on, so it's very easy to see the proof. You give them your data, you give them money.

Now, power is easier to understand. If you want to control or kill people, the more information you have the better. It's easy to see why evil governments have always loved spying.

Added.

It's been my experience throughout the years.
I haven't personally heard "I have nothing to hide"
since Huawei phones started to become banned in my country.

The moment they became popular they went from
"I've got nothing to hide" to "I've got nothing to hide, but this is different. Huawei is subject to the Chinese State.
Those other phones are made by our allies. We may have found time after time again that all phones of all our politicians have been tapped by the US and it's true that no matter how hard our best security experts searched for listening bugs in these devices, they found diddly squat, but if you own one of those Chinese phones and think you're not being listened to, than you're being naive. Naive naive, !be scared!, naive national security naive.".

Thanks.

You first you coward!