I am an apartment building manager. Once, years ago, I was brought in to clean up after another manager who had quit/been fired for... let's just call it incompetence.
Anyway, there was a unit in the building that was occupied by a guy I never met or even saw, and the rent was months overdue. So I followed the required legal procedure to declare the unit abandoned. I spoke to neighbors. I posted notices, etc. Eventually, the unit was legally declared abandoned and I started the task of clearing out any property left behind.
The unit was very neat and tidy and full of nice stuff. Not the usual state of a rental that someone abandoned, and this should have tipped me off. But it didn't, and so I had everything hauled away. Furniture, electronics, clothes, the lot.
Then after 6 months I moved on to a different building. Later, I learned that the person who lived there was on active duty in the military, and that's why no one had seen them for months. Apparently, a neighbor had been entrusted to pay the rent but they had just kept the money for themselves, and lied to me when I inquired about the neighbor's whereabouts.
So, this poor guy comes back from overseas military service to discover that not only has he lost his apartment but also everything in it. And since I had followed the legal procedure, no law was broken (by me.)
Several autonomous car companies operate in my city. They're impressive technology, but they're not nearly as good as an attentive human driver. In particular, they have problems coping with anything unexpected, such as road closures or emergency vehicles, and they do not understand gestures.
The actual reason in most cases is because they think that abolishing capitalism would benefit them personally. Whether this is true or not is debatable, but that's ultimately beside the point.
That historic examples such as the Nazis, the Japanese-American internment, and the Rwanda genocide should guide us when deciding what sorts of large-scale demographic data harvesting we as a society want to allow in the first place. That the "right to privacy" in this case is not about personal privacy but of collective privacy.
Which is why even people who "have nothing to hide" should care about privacy rights.
The French Revolution is way more complex and nuanced than that, and saying the people protested against the power of the king per se is really missing the point.
A better example would have been King Charles I and the English civil war.
It doesn't have to be inevitable in order to serve as an example of what can happen when even seemingly innocuous information falls into the wrong hands. It's happened before, and the consequences were horrifying. It will happen again, particularly if people refuse to learn from the examples of history.
Information is knowledge. Knowledge is power. And power in the wrong hands is dangerous.
I am an apartment building manager. Once, years ago, I was brought in to clean up after another manager who had quit/been fired for... let's just call it incompetence.
Anyway, there was a unit in the building that was occupied by a guy I never met or even saw, and the rent was months overdue. So I followed the required legal procedure to declare the unit abandoned. I spoke to neighbors. I posted notices, etc. Eventually, the unit was legally declared abandoned and I started the task of clearing out any property left behind.
The unit was very neat and tidy and full of nice stuff. Not the usual state of a rental that someone abandoned, and this should have tipped me off. But it didn't, and so I had everything hauled away. Furniture, electronics, clothes, the lot.
Then after 6 months I moved on to a different building. Later, I learned that the person who lived there was on active duty in the military, and that's why no one had seen them for months. Apparently, a neighbor had been entrusted to pay the rent but they had just kept the money for themselves, and lied to me when I inquired about the neighbor's whereabouts.
So, this poor guy comes back from overseas military service to discover that not only has he lost his apartment but also everything in it. And since I had followed the legal procedure, no law was broken (by me.)