The big issue to me was always the data falling into malicious hands. Sure it's not a big deal if you buy a red shirt and I buy a blue shirt but it is a big de

The big issue to me was always the data falling into malicious hands. Sure it's not a big deal if you buy a red shirt and I buy a blue shirt but it is a big deal if you can piece together the security questions (thankfully falling out of fashion as a recovery method) for my bank account. It's not a big deal when you don't get an advertisement for your local university but if an authoritarian government roots out gay people because they have access to credit card data for Grindr subscription charges that's probably not great. I guess my impression is that it's not what's happened so far (although certainly innumerable lives have been sullied for weeks, months or years at a time due to identity theft, credit card fraud, and the rest), it's the potential of what could be.