It's obviously bad when "real" data like full names and credit card info leaks, but most data companies collect is probably email address and some anonymous things like which buttons and when the user clicked.

Nevertheless, such data collection, tracking and telemetry is considered quite bad among power users. I don't support those practices either. But I'm struggling to consolidate my arguments agaist data collection. The one I'm confident about is effects on performance and battery life on mobile devices, but why else it's bad I'm not sure.

What are your arguments? Why is it bad when a company X knows what anonymous user Y did and made money on that info? What's the good response to anyone who asks why I'm doing the "privacy things"?

Everyone hates ads. Frankly, no one wants to pay for anything online. And places like CoinHive offer a service that doesn't clutter the screen and pays people. Too good to be true right? Well the first group of people to latch on the service ramped up the mines to 8 threads at 100% because they were hackers and didn't care if they slowed your computer or drained your battery. They just wanted their almost untraceable money.

What I'm proposing is that if sites were to use miners that instead use 2/4 threads at 10% thereby using far less resources, across enough users provided your traffic is ok, could the results be tangible if we gave it a chance?

edit: I hate cryptocurrency but I was more trying to discuss the idea of getting paid for passive CPU usage more described in this comment by @spctrvl