To take your "shopping improvement through beacons" example: A solution where the beacons merely send an ID (and not receive _anything_) and have the client do

To take your "shopping improvement through beacons" example: A solution where the beacons merely send an ID (and not receive _anything_) and have the client do all the processing with a map of features they downloaded once would alleviate the issue. That would be customer service. Using that data to track users in the shop is not. That's just Big Data. If you're also interested in hot spots around the shop to optimize ways and where to present high value items, those can be obtained through different means (eg. light barriers that simply count and send accumulated data every 10 minutes - no need to infer where any given customer has been at any time). When wondering about "ID that can be stolen, copied, and sold on the black market thus ruining their financial livelihood for the rest of their lives", there are several ways to approach it. One of them involves making loss of ID instruments a less severe event. "ID theft protection services" is a business model I've only seen in the US. It's not privacy that's broken, but lazy and unambitious business models that collect data first and think about how to use it second, and tolerate that abuse of that data leads to horrible outcomes every now and then (as long as it's on somebody else's dime). So your concern is that privacy gets in the way of commercializing biometric technology. May it do that for a long, long time.