If i'm reading this right, i see two arguments here.
The first is a slippery slope. They are starting to use facial recognition now and will soon be asking for my DNA and fingerprints. I just don't agree that the slope is slippery. Why would my grocery store care to collect that information? We're talking about grocery store items - the company just wants to know what i'm buying so they can send me ads to buy more stuff. They have no interest in my fingerprints or DNA. This honestly just comes off as paranoid and conspiratorial.
The second argument is more interesting. You fear that different databases (grocery, driving, fitness, etc) will be joined together and deployed against us. I don't think this is an unreasonable fear at all. However, I totally disagree that fighting this on the collection side will be fruitful. The unfortunate conclusion i've come to here is that there is no individual action I can take to stop the collection and collation of all this data. I can limit how much information I share - which I do when necessary - but again, what i'm buying at the grocery store is not the privacy hill worth dying on.
Instead the better way to fight this is with laws. The specific example you brought up is Health insurance discrimination but the problem with your example is that large parts of it are already banned by law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
The Affordable Care Act added even more limits to what insurers can do to decide on rates.
Actually I mean something closer to shifting baseline [1] in a broader sense. We've just come to accept a vast loss of privacy as surveillance and data gathering has become so cheap, so pervasive, and insidiously hidden, that at this point it is impossible to stop it. The inertia is all rolling downhill at this point. The slippery slope has slipped and slid already, well past what we would have considered acceptable a generation ago. It was unthinkable when I was a kid in the 1980s or a teenager in the 1990s that they would do so much tracking, in meatspace and cyberspace.
And you're right that there is no way to stop it, except through laws. The US government is completely asleep at the wheel. Worse, they've been paid off to be asleep at the wheel.
The first is a slippery slope. They are starting to use facial recognition now and will soon be asking for my DNA and fingerprints. I just don't agree that the slope is slippery. Why would my grocery store care to collect that information? We're talking about grocery store items - the company just wants to know what i'm buying so they can send me ads to buy more stuff. They have no interest in my fingerprints or DNA. This honestly just comes off as paranoid and conspiratorial.
The second argument is more interesting. You fear that different databases (grocery, driving, fitness, etc) will be joined together and deployed against us. I don't think this is an unreasonable fear at all. However, I totally disagree that fighting this on the collection side will be fruitful. The unfortunate conclusion i've come to here is that there is no individual action I can take to stop the collection and collation of all this data. I can limit how much information I share - which I do when necessary - but again, what i'm buying at the grocery store is not the privacy hill worth dying on.
Instead the better way to fight this is with laws. The specific example you brought up is Health insurance discrimination but the problem with your example is that large parts of it are already banned by law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
The Affordable Care Act added even more limits to what insurers can do to decide on rates.