2025: Why should I care if a grocery has my DNA and fingerprints? They already have facial recognition and a record of everything I ever bought, it's not like they are sharing it with anyone.
Also 2025: Why should I care if my gym has facial recognition technology?
2026: Why should I care if a grocery shares my DNA and entire purchase history with my insurance provider? It's not like I'm obese. I go to the gym.
2027: Why should I care that my insurance provider has DNA sequencing technology, my entire purchase history from every grocery store ever, my gym history, my driving history, my family history, a record of my health and fitness habits? I'm healthy.
2030: I suddenly have $500,000 in health bills because my health insurance provider dropped me 1 week before I had a sudden heart attack and presented 400 pages of evidence to the judge that it was justified based on the policy violations they repeatedly caught me doing. I guess I didn't read the fine print! I guess I shouldn't have smoked that one cigarette outside the bar when I was drunk that night, or have gotten drunk in the first place. And that burger on the fourth of July. I agree, in hindsight, that was over the line. All those premiums, and they drop me the second I am no longer profitable to them! But they're a business, they provide a valuable service to people who couldn't otherwise afford healtchare, so...
If i'm reading this right, i see two arguments here.
The first is a slippery slope. They are starting to use facial recognition now and will soon be asking for my DNA and fingerprints. I just don't agree that the slope is slippery. Why would my grocery store care to collect that information? We're talking about grocery store items - the company just wants to know what i'm buying so they can send me ads to buy more stuff. They have no interest in my fingerprints or DNA. This honestly just comes off as paranoid and conspiratorial.
The second argument is more interesting. You fear that different databases (grocery, driving, fitness, etc) will be joined together and deployed against us. I don't think this is an unreasonable fear at all. However, I totally disagree that fighting this on the collection side will be fruitful. The unfortunate conclusion i've come to here is that there is no individual action I can take to stop the collection and collation of all this data. I can limit how much information I share - which I do when necessary - but again, what i'm buying at the grocery store is not the privacy hill worth dying on.
Instead the better way to fight this is with laws. The specific example you brought up is Health insurance discrimination but the problem with your example is that large parts of it are already banned by law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrim...
The Affordable Care Act added even more limits to what insurers can do to decide on rates.
Actually I mean something closer to shifting baseline [1] in a broader sense. We've just come to accept a vast loss of privacy as surveillance and data gathering has become so cheap, so pervasive, and insidiously hidden, that at this point it is impossible to stop it. The inertia is all rolling downhill at this point. The slippery slope has slipped and slid already, well past what we would have considered acceptable a generation ago. It was unthinkable when I was a kid in the 1980s or a teenager in the 1990s that they would do so much tracking, in meatspace and cyberspace.
And you're right that there is no way to stop it, except through laws. The US government is completely asleep at the wheel. Worse, they've been paid off to be asleep at the wheel.
All of these concerns can be prevented with effective laws, which most people would agree is a better solution that boycotting the world or wearing elaborate disguises in public (as has been suggested in many other comments here).
Also 2025: Why should I care if my gym has facial recognition technology?
2026: Why should I care if a grocery shares my DNA and entire purchase history with my insurance provider? It's not like I'm obese. I go to the gym.
2027: Why should I care that my insurance provider has DNA sequencing technology, my entire purchase history from every grocery store ever, my gym history, my driving history, my family history, a record of my health and fitness habits? I'm healthy.
2030: I suddenly have $500,000 in health bills because my health insurance provider dropped me 1 week before I had a sudden heart attack and presented 400 pages of evidence to the judge that it was justified based on the policy violations they repeatedly caught me doing. I guess I didn't read the fine print! I guess I shouldn't have smoked that one cigarette outside the bar when I was drunk that night, or have gotten drunk in the first place. And that burger on the fourth of July. I agree, in hindsight, that was over the line. All those premiums, and they drop me the second I am no longer profitable to them! But they're a business, they provide a valuable service to people who couldn't otherwise afford healtchare, so...