"Do we forget that not long ago everyone's name, address, and phone number was published in the phone book [...]" The phone book is an opt-in system, with the

"Do we forget that not long ago everyone's name, address, and phone number was published in the phone book [...]" The phone book is an opt-in system, with the ability to remain "unlisted". There's absolutely no such choice, though, from these modern, private data collectors. And they're everywhere. Consider the following hypothetical: A battered wife flees her husband and takes shelter in a shared house run by a women's organization. In your phone book world, she didn't need to dramatically alter her existence to stay safe. She could continue to maintain a reasonable subset of her professional and social relationships. She could get a new job in a new city. She could buy groceries. She could pay her own electricity bill. And she definitely didn't need to take her life in her hands to order a cheese pizza. In this brave new world, though, her ex can track her with the utmost ease. She has to shed nearly every piece of her modern identity -- reconfigure apps, wipe her phone/laptop/tablet, stop using sites that geolocate via IP, and halt nearly all interactions with the modern economy -- at significant social cost. The sheer number and diversity of data collection points -- and their increasing necessity to participate in the digital economy -- makes opting out orders-of-magnitude more difficult. Yours is a false comparison.