The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.
Normalized or not, the risk is you get something akin US drug enforcement: ignored for certain demographics, enforced for others. The ability to see someone's porn history is irrelevant until a government (or employer perhaps) wants to weaponize it.
The problem isn't my peers, it's the people in power and how many of them lack any scruples.
this seems to run parallel to the "i have nothing to hide" / "well they have everyone's data, so who cares about mine" arguments.
this is too narrow a view on the issue. the problem isn't that a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or government employee is going to snoop through your data. the problem is that once any government has everyone's data, they will feed it to PRISM-esque systems and use it to accurately model the population, granting the power to predict and shape future events.
The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.