> We believe, any entity having access to so much personal information is a great risk to world peace, freedom and democracy.
I often seen privacy advocates make sweeping statements like this, but I have a hard time understanding their concerns because I haven't really gotten an answer as to how they see it happening.
EDIT: Also to be clear, I think it is completely valid to object to data collection on moral / ethical grounds alone. And the fact that even if you merely send an email to a gmail account means your data will be tracked is a violation of that choice. However I think claims that this is in turn a great threat to democracy are often used as a kugel to convince other people that they are wrong for not sharing those moral / ethical objections.
I'll take a stab at it, since I'm one of those privacy advocates (and also prone to making sweeping statements like this).
Let's say Alice and Bob are doing life and emailing each other about normal life stuff. Charlie runs their email server.
Charlie also runs an advertising business to fund his email server. He somehow reads (not necessarily manually, but the details don't matter) the emails coming through his server to learn what people are more likely to be interested in buying. Everyone benefits, right? Alice and Bob get free email, the advertisers get well-targeted ads, and Charlie gets paid by the advertisers.
Well, along comes the Police. They know that Charlie is able to access contents of emails going through his server, because it's how he funds his email server. The police would need a warrant to search Alice and Bob's communication for something that might incriminate them in an investigation, but Charlie doesn't need a warrant. The police strike a deal with Charlie of mutual benefit. Information for another revenue stream. But still, the police are upholders of justice and only use this "email tap" for good.
Time goes on and our glorious democracy erodes into an autocratic state (ask Germany - it happens!). Suddenly our justice-loving Police have become the Gestapo, but money talks and it's in Charlie's interest to stay on the Gestapo's good side, so the email tap remains in place and we have Alice and Bob, good people that they are, collaborating on how to resist the autocratic state, which gets funneled straight to the Gestapo. Bad guys win.
Essentially it boils down to this: the means for the public to resist tyranny is a necessary prerequisite for freedom. Conversely, the more power (and information is power, especially personal information) is centralized, the more impactful a potential hostile takeover becomes, and the easier to orchestrate (much easier to infiltrate/control one source of information than thousands).
An example of how this could play out is how easily Google and other big tech cooperate with government requests nowadays (compared to, say, a decade or so ago, when Apple was openly fighting the FBI in court to not be forced to make a tool to unlock locked iPhones).
It allows the government to censor things without having to explicitly deal with legal challenges, and in exchange the company gets good will and favors holding back regulation. That easily leads into things like election manipulation.
There's also the massive target it paints on their back in terms of data breaches.
There are also other things to consider. IIRC with one of the NSA related leaks, there was the story of employees abusing the data collection for personal purposes. Private companies have even less oversight towards the public on how the data is being used.
"but I can never get an answer as to how exactly they see it playing out."
The standard answer is, that it creates a strong power imbalance. When every politician can be brought down by scandals and one entity is in posession of all the scandals - then they could controll every politician. (it is not like this today, but this is what we privacy advocates want to prevent)
I often seen privacy advocates make sweeping statements like this, but I have a hard time understanding their concerns because I haven't really gotten an answer as to how they see it happening.
EDIT: Also to be clear, I think it is completely valid to object to data collection on moral / ethical grounds alone. And the fact that even if you merely send an email to a gmail account means your data will be tracked is a violation of that choice. However I think claims that this is in turn a great threat to democracy are often used as a kugel to convince other people that they are wrong for not sharing those moral / ethical objections.