This reminds me of the old days where people would encrypt all their emails, no matter how mundane, with blowfish. I'm pretty sure there must be some sort of inverse relationship between the effort you put in to hiding your comms activity and the amount of stuff you actually need to hide.
That type of encryption was more about preventing governments from reading all your communication. There was talk about ECHELON and similar data-traffic-trawling systems.
The "risk" to the average person from those systems was very low. (Ignoring, for a moment, the jobs lost to industrial espionage.)
But we know that gathering huge data-sets is important to many companies. Sometimes those companies are lawful (Google or Facebook) but sometimes they are unlawful (Russian criminal gangs). And even if they're lawful companies they may be using the data in bad ways, or not keeping the data secure.
It is amazing to see what people give up in return for "free" smileys or animated cursors or a shitty facebook game.
I completely agree with you, but it matters what type of data we're talking about here. Facebook scared me off a long time ago with its policies and what it knew about me, but it's a different story with Google's personalized search. I don't worry about a company knowing my browsing habits. I worry about a company losing my credit card info or leaking my SSN or deleting my emails. Compared to those things, preventing Google from guessing my demographic via search analysis is pretty much meaningless.
