An extended quote on the value of data from The Register UK that’s worth repeating:

As technologists, we must stop looking at user data as one more thing to monopolise and monetise; we need to treat data as sacrosanct.

We, as users, must not allow our data to be used to lock us into “solutions”, or be mined by corporations or governments. It’s easy to understand the importance of securing data when we talk about passwords, but other forms of data are equally important. A journalist’s contact list being mined could endanger their sources. As much as we hate to acknowledge it, revealing an illness or even an ethnicity that someone has kept carefully hidden could end up costing them their livelihood – or in some locales, even their lives.

Our data is no longer entirely under our control. As users we must examine every link in the chain of custody and ask ourselves “who could potentially gain access to our data and how?” We must demand steps be taken to ensure that nobody but us should ever have access to our data for any reason unless we explicitly allow it.

We need to demand this of the companies that create our applications. We must demand this of our governments and even the companies we work for. The alternative is a world without secrets; a world where one mistake – no matter how minor – can haunt us for a lifetime.

Humans are not particularly forgiving. We are cliquish and tribal, we seek constantly not to include others but instead to find reasons to exclude them. Our history is littered with discrimination based on every conceivable factor of our existence. This has manifested in everything from light heckling to segregation, slavery, torture and genocide.

It is easy to look at the more awful and extreme end of that spectrum and say that this is something that happened only in humanity’s barbaric past, or in far-off places. We can abstract away the horrors of Darfur and Burma by telling ourselves that the people involved are somehow less than us – different, less civilised. How many are aware of the irony of the selfsame thought, one that creates an “us” and a “them” based on what would be nothing more than data in a spreadsheet: Country of Origin?

…

We cannot even grant our governments powers to invade privacy without their immediate and blatant misuse. Powers created strictly to protect national security and deal with the very real threat of terrorism are used to spy on people putting out too many bags of garbage for collection.

-The Register UK