you lose your children when in the middle a custody battle your partner (or ex-partner) subpoenas your phone records, or even your medical records, and uses that to help convince a judge that you're unfit due to your mental health issues and that those issues will have an impact on your child. (see https://dadsdivorce.com/articles/parents-mental-illness-chil...). The stigma that exists surrounding mental illness makes losing your child far too easy.

How would you lose a job? Your would-be employer faced with two otherwise equally qualified candidates pays a third party to run a background check that includes information lifted from your social media sites (https://www.careerbuilder.com/advice/social-media-survey-201...) and collected from data brokers.

> Data brokers will often combine all the information outlined in these two lists to build complex profiles about each of us. These profiles are used for an increasing number of purposes, from serving targeted advertising to crafting insurance policies to providing background checks for employers. (source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/its-a-data-brokers-world-a...).

The FTC has warned about this kind of thing (https://www.nydailynews.com/sdut-ftc-puts-background-check-s...) but it still happens.

Maybe you called the suicide hotline using your cell phone and some sketchy app (like a call blocking app or facebook: https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/25/17160944/facebook-call-hi... or even a stalker app: https://news.softpedia.com/news/stalker-android-apps-with-th...) sold your contacts/call history or maybe your phone company did it. See this example from the article here: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/att-accused-of-v...

> "[T]he sale of CPNI to the government isn’t our only concern—when we did a little more poking around, we found that all four major mobile carriers (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon) have privacy policies that indicate they believe it is OK to sell or share similar records to anyone,"

It's not really a question of "how is anyone going to know?". Every communication you make is logged forever and shared (read: sold) with "partners" and turned over to the state. Someone, somewhere, will absolutely have that data. You aren't allowed to know who has it, where they got it, how accurate it is, what they are doing with it, or how/if it's being secured, but it is out there and it will follow you for the rest of your life.