I agree with the other commenters about the scale of this “deriving inspiration from others” is where this feels wrong.
It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.
In that example it's not the scale that makes it right or wrong, the scale of people impacted just affects the degree of wrongs that have been committed.
> Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with.
If acquiring a warrant is the basic action being scaled, I'd be okay with that ethically if it was done under, what I define as, reasonable pretenses. Regardless of how it scales, I still think it would be the right thing to do assuming the pretenses for the first action could be applied to everyone wiretapped. Now if I thought the base action was morally wrong (someone was tailed or wiretapped without proper pretenses), I'd think it's wrong regardless of the scale. The number of people it affected might impact how wrong I saw it, but not whether it was right or wrong to.
It feels similar to the ye olden debates on police surveillance. Acquiring a warrant to tail a suspect, tapping a single individual’s phone line, etc all feels like very normal run-of-the-mill police work that no one has a problem with. Collating your behavior across every website and device you own from a data broker is fundamentally the same thing as a single phone’s wiretap, but it obviously feels way grosser and more unethical because it scales way past the point of what you’d imagine as being acceptable.