Overpopulation is the root cause of many other serious issues such as hunger, lack of access to sanitation/medical treatment/education. We live in a world with finite resources, so the more of us there are, the less each of us gets.
The GDPR does not, as far as I'm aware, have safe harbor clause for startups and other small companies that end up collecting some personal information incidentally as part of whatever they are trying to do but don't have the resources to properly manage it. Lack of such a provision could really hurt innovation.
All information centralizing in the hands of the few companies that can afford the consultants and lawyer time to figure out what the GDPR even means is an unambiguously worse outcome for people’s privacy.
I would go so far as “any company with a mature regulatory compliance function is an extreme threat to your privacy and not mitigated in any way by the GDPR” and “any company small enough to plausibly be found in noncompliance with the GDPR was never a threat.”
You make it sound nefarious. "Collecting" could be as simple as having a mis-configured webserver log that captures too much. Should a big company take measures to protect user data, and be penalized for breaches? Absolutely. Should a one-man-show app developer be slapped with a crippling fine for something slapped together just trying to see if he can make something people want and try out product/market fit? Only if your goal is to grant an unchallengeable de facto monopoly to the existing players.
Should we grant an exception from food handling regulations to new restaurants because they don't have the pockets to have chefs and kitchens as well equipped as big chains? Should we slap big fines on people that just want to try and make a new recipe using innovative ingredients?
For a better analogy, replace food with medication.
Yes and yes. Small food stalls and food trucks should not be held to the same standards as professional restaurants and franchises. Personal use of medications should be less restrictive than pharmacies.
Right now, I can't imagine that being served content "more relevant to me" is so valuable as to warrant a corporation systematically recording my doings. My current reaction is: I'm perfectly capable of finding relevant stuff on my own, thank you very much.
Google is doing good today but it could be owned by anyone tomorrow. Even ARM Holdings changed ownership just this last year because of market/politics. So, replace Google with your poison - China/Russia/Your neighbor/Some bank/Wallstreet etc. Note that this is different from theft and security because in Google's case you willingly gave away the data.
Because, depending on your usage, Google can know more about you than anyone else, and can use that knowledge for much more sinister means than "serving more relevant content".
Our economic system is based on growth, I believe.
Population growth increases demand for goods and services. This generates new jobs, venture opportunities and increases the value of existing assets such as real estate and securities. Overall population growth creates a positive spiral in the economic sense.
Of course none of this takes into account that we live in a world with limited resources. And there is no incentive to do so - as long as you have sufficient assets that stand to rise in value. It's the people who have the least that suffer the most from overpopulation.
I think all things being equal, growth in population is a wash. In a static economy I would think that one more adult will on average and at scale contribute about as much as they consume.
AFAIU our economic system (or at least our expectations of it) is based on productivity growth--more output for an equivalent input of labor. The additional output gains are the basic source of wealth creation.
For various reasons I think it's easier to maintain robust productivity growth with a growing population. Workers reach maximum productivity age 40-50.[1] Also, if you want the 40- to 50-year-olds of tomorrow to be at the top of their game you want them to begin learning to use their tools today.
So an aging population has an increasing proportion of workers past their prime and, worse, those people will be even less productive with newer technology than workers about to enter their prime productivity years.
If the population is shrinking then things are worse because now there are fewer workers paying for services for the elderly. But that's a different sort of issue, I think.
Alternatively, we could just kill old people. Then we might even be able to sustain high productivity growth even as the population shrinks. But I suspect old people might be critical for sociological reasons; society might be much less stable in their absence.
They still record your IP address and link it to all the sites you visit that have a facebook script.