"Set aside any discussion about when and whether the data collection is justified. When one side has a lot of it, and the other none, there’s a problem.
The best argument I’ve heard for this comes from University of Washington professor Ryan Calo, who wrote a paper on the data collection being done by marketers and corporations.
In a healthy consumer/marketer relationship, he argues, consumers have tools to resist marketers’ pull. When corporations can collect and exploit vast amounts of consumer data, they can nullify many of those tools, rendering consumers too weak for their own good."