Are you saying ”I don’t have anything to hide”?

All of your data starts affecting everything your data is used for.

You may get worse rates for a mortgage, or not get one at all. You may be denied insurance or insurance claims. Cherry-picked details of your online activities may be used against you in a court of law, if you ever find yourself in one for any reason (think custody).

These are the very mild examples from a somewhat functional society. In the other end of the spectrum, where societal breakdown is imminent, you have things like getting disappeared, thrown in a concentration camp, executed on your own front yard.

Oh, I don't think I have nothing to hide. I have plenty to hide, so I hide it.

I just don't think blocking cookies meaningfully protects anything that I want to hide. I feel like it is putting gloves on while you walk around naked, it isn't doing anything to protect your privacy.

> You may get worse rates for a mortgage, or not get one at all.

That is an interesting example, because getting a mortgage is going to require me to voluntarily give ALL my personal information to the company giving me the loan, and they will absolutely use all of that to determine if I get a better or worse rate. I am literally giving them my entire financial history, they don't need to try to piece it together using my browsing history.

Also, shouldn't mortgage companies determine rates based on personal information about you? How else should they manage risk? It would be awful for our society if banks were forced to give loans out at flat rates for everyone. There would be zero incentive to pay back loans, because they can't use you not paying it back to decide not to give you more money in the future. If banks had to give everyone the same rate, they would stop lending money entirely. There would be no way to avoid losing it all, why would you do that? No, we WANT loans to be based on personal information, because that is what allows us to have control over our own financial reputation.

> Cherry-picked details of your online activities may be used against you in a court of law, if you ever find yourself in one for any reason (think custody).

This one seems very nebulous, and a very unlikely and low risk. Courts can do discovery; they can obtain much more personal information than cookie based online tracking data. I can't see how this would be worth considering.

> These are the very mild examples from a somewhat functional society. In the other end of the spectrum, where societal breakdown is imminent, you have things like getting disappeared, thrown in a concentration camp, executed on your own front yard.

If this happens, browsing history is going to be the least of our worries. They might throw you into a camp because you DON'T have any browsing history and that is suspicious. If there is no rule of law, you can't expect plausible deniability to help with anything. If we get to that point, they are going to have a lot more than ad tracking data to work with. The added risk seems negligible.

Presumably you might also get better rates for a mortgage, to be fair.