I certainly do value my privacy much more than the average person. I don't even have accounts on the likes of Facebook, for example. I am not even close to an average level of concern, and I fully acknowledge that.

On the other hand, I am also far more technically knowledgeable about the potential implications of privacy intrusions than the average person, and unfortunately I have all too often seen what can happen to friends and colleagues who aren't as careful as me and wind up victims.

The harm may only be theoretical in your experience, and I've no reason to doubt you. However, just thinking about my personal contacts over the years, I have heard of lost jobs (multiple times), credit denied for a mortgage, a gay friend living in my country whose society back home is still hostile to homosexuality being publicly outed by mistake, identity thefts (multiple) including a huge financial loss to a company I sometimes work with where someone authorised to make large payments was very carefully impersonated using a range of information gathered over a considerable period of time, leaks of potentially embarrassing healthcare records (multiple times from multiple sources), cyberstalking (really creepy remote access to unsecured in-house devices like baby monitors and cameras) and a couple of big surprises (on the scale of a marriage proposal) spoiled by careless disclosures. I'm not aware of any personal contact of mine who has been a victim of something like burglary or having their children taken as a result of a criminal discovering and exploiting their household routines, but obviously these aren't out of the question either.

Now, obviously I'm not suggesting that someone spying on your TV habits is necessarily going to lead to harm on that scale (though I note in passing that if you hold a public office and watch the "wrong" TV programmes then it's not entirely inconceivable, hence laws like the Video Privacy Protection Act in the US). But the risks from excessive surveillance, including the collection and use of incomplete or inaccurate data, are not theoretical at all. If you've never known anyone suffer the kinds of problems I mentioned above then I'd guess you and your friends have been extremely lucky; it's not like this stuff happens in my social group all the time, but I'd estimate that I've heard about at least one or two serious problems a year over the past decade or so.

All of this affects my opinions, naturally. However, perhaps the thing that sways me more than anything else is that I've been noticing recently how much some people are put off by privacy intrusions if they are better informed about what is really happening and the implications. I think a lot of people simply don't understand what they are allegedly consenting to or what might happen as a result, and sometimes you can't even see the results. After all, how do you know whether your insurance premium has been increased, your credit limit affected, or your job application denied, on the basis of information you never knew someone else had and never had any opportunity to check or refute? Realistically, I don't think it's possible to educate everyone sufficiently on these issues for them to protect themselves as much as they might choose to if they were fully informed, any more than you can make everyone an expert on how financial services work or the shady practices of used car dealers. This is why we delegate some amount of protection to people who do have the time and resources to become experts, and who do have a mandate to balance allowing businesses to do business against looking out for the interests of society as a whole.