this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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TL;DR: You're better off leaving behind a thinner data trail than not.
This is a valid argument, but then again the same could be said of much of any other data collection done by big tech companies.
The value isn't so much as in individual pieces of data or even in an individual person's data but rather the aggregation of many individuals' data in order to make maybe a pointed marketing campaign, sell such data to shady advertisers and scammers, or stuff it into some AI model.
I would think in specific situations, the data of an individual person may matter. Like when the government asks a tech company for data whether with good or bad intentions. But that one seems to happen less often as far as I'm aware.
Overall, you can think of it as risk management. It's hard to know all the situations in which the data you leave behind would be relevant. But one thing we can know is that for some reason, these huge corporations are spending billions of dollars a year in order to collect it, and lots of it. If it wasn't a viable strategy, they probably would've stopped a while ago.