I agree that long term data value will outweigh privacy on some level. I think that meta data will be the middle ground in that decision long term. I do not k

I agree that long term data value will outweigh privacy on some level. I think that meta data will be the middle ground in that decision long term. I do not know how governments(any form) can provide services to a user base of hundreds of millions/billions without detailed usage data. Attempting to guess the usage patterns of a user base that large is improbable. At some point in the future society will be faced with a decision to collect data for the improvement of resource allocation in all of its forms. We are currently in the before you can crawl period of data collection, of which we now collect just enough data to draw mostly incorrect or narrow hypothesis about its nature. A realistic example is road construction. The public charges the government with constructing resource intensive roads, with only superficial data about their usage, traffic counts and building permits. In this scenario we ideally hope to get roads that support the most common traffic patterns, while providing decision makers with the results of the current system and not the actual patterns that created them. While I am sure they can deduce some form of meaningful analysis from something like traffic counts they are obviously an after the fact data set, that when used to plan future development lead to false analysis. The alternative data set would be all GPS meta data for all connected devices, and then applied to the decision process. The from where and to where piece of geo-analysis would fundamentally change the planning process. A similar example would be for the Facebook UI team or networking team to provide new features and continuously optimize current features, while being only provided page views and raw user growth. No referral data, click tracking, dwell times, return frequency, workflow analysis, network paths, geographic usage data, browser info, or bandwidth data. Simply allocate the resources of the teams based on pageviews and raw user growth numbers. You would be able to research new features, but only by asking 100 users what they want or where they are from. Each feature you create cost $10mil and once launched can only be changed for $100mil, and the new feature deletes 1% of your user accounts. I am not saying that privacy is not relevant, but I am saying that at some point in the future data will be more important, critically in the health sciences and public works(globally).