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Still it is worth thinking the effects of disclosing meta-data that a legal entity has collected about another entity (here an individual). Is it not abetting t

Still it is worth thinking the effects of disclosing meta-data that a legal entity has collected about another entity (here an individual). Is it not abetting to disclose when you are away from your house and what alarm system you have to a burglar? What if you do that via wikipedia? I think even if you have no ownership of the data and stealing is not involved, that does not give the collecting or managing party the right to sell or publicize or share that data, necessarily. There have been studies about the value (and impact) of inferences from metadata e.g. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/20/5536.short https://www.pnas.org/content/113/20/5536.short . ((Edit) Agreeing with you, steal is incorrect term in a lot of cases, however I am not sure if we can say it is not applicable in general.)

smsm42 8y ago
Disclosing certain information (like, your banking account password) would certainly harm you. But this is not the kind of information we're discussing here, are we? We are discussing kind of information that is already either public or semi-public (i.e. known to some - potentially wide - circle of unknown people) but aggregation and concentration of which may lead to knowledge about you that you'd prefer not to be public. I am not sure we have an adequate legal model now to deal with it. We should probably get to developing one real soon. But roping in emotional terms from the different field - like calling it "stealing" or "robbery" or "piracy" or "stampeding cattle through Vatican" is not very helpful. It makes it look as if it's simple - if it's stealing, stealing is already banned, just use the same laws here - but it's not and those laws won't work. Real work is needed here, not wordplay.