eivarv

Whether people are convinced or not – your claim was that it provided "justification".

My point is that it does no such thing – it doesn't hold up as a valid argument (which really is the bare minimum for something to even be considered as potentially true).

No, it does not – for two reasons:

  - Two wrongs don't make a right: Someone behaving unethical does not excuse unethical behavior from someone else.
  - There is a difference in the power dynamics of the relationships: Consumer and service provider VS citizen and state.

If anything, laws and right should be strengthened to explicitly ban this behavior.

Yet bulk data collection (in effect "mass surveillance") happens, and poses a risk in and of itself to data subjects.

Yes, if you mean true anonymization – i.e. not pseudonymization (e.g. replacing names with a pseudonym) or in any other way retaining personal data (internal identifiers, usage patterns or attributes that combined result in a unique enough fingerprint to identify a specific person, etc.)

Out of curiosity: How does any argument become more or less logical depending on its context?

Your comment reads to me as if the concept of logical fallacies is only useful or valid within the framework of rhetorical competitions – or alternatively that logically invalid reasoning is useful if you're only interested in making a decision, rather than making a correct or well-informed one.

Exactly – this is currently a regulatory problem, and blockchains, decentralized identity, etc. won't solve anything in this space. On the contrary, it will by definition enable identification in some types of data.

This makes me conclude that these types of solutions are really more about portability and making some sort of political point (the only thing users realistically control is first party authorization – nothing else); They certainly don't have any security or privacy-related guarantees.

    could protect against all sorts of abuse...

Could it, though? What's to stop someone that gains access to user data (by legitimate means) to make a copy?

> I wish the field of psychiatry was mature and used different words for depression caused by [...]

Isn't this covered by "situational depression" (adjustment disorder with depressed mood) VS "clinical depression" (major depressive disorder), and the fact that diagnosis entails excluding physical conditions that cause similar symptoms?

None of the various depressive disorders (nor other psychiatric disorders) deal with defining a cause, but with describing a set of symptoms.

There is a lower limit to privacy (as a human right) – which after passing, societies would seize to be "free" (liberal democracies?). But that's not a discussion people seem to want to have, when talking about their good intentions of fighting against horrible things.