From the perspective that you are your instances, it matters because if you fear being abused, you would fear any instance of you being abused. You wouldn't want to walk into an atomically precise copying machine with the knowledge that the copy is going to be used in cruel experiments.
The question becomes, where do you draw the line? Is a rough copy of you based on your facebook posts and whatever advanced AI can extrapolate from that just as worthy of you anticipating their experiences? Or perhaps you should fear ending up as that person on a relative scale depending how similar it is -- if it is 50% similar, have 50% of the fear, etc. Fear and other emotions don't have to be a simple binary relationship, after all.
Empathy is an emotion that seems to be distinctly different (meaning, it feels different and probably happens differently on a biochemical and neurological level) from the emotion of actually anticipating being the individual. So while yes I would feel empathy for any abused clones that applies regardless of the degree to which I have fear of waking up as them, it would not be the only emotion because I believe I would be the clones. Any information I had that indicates that clones might be abused in the future becomes much more near to me and I am more likely to take action on it if I think it likely that I will actually be one of them.
Thus if you think the future is bad in a way that prohibits wanting to wake up from cryonics to any serious degree, then it might be smart to be concerned for the safety of clones who could be you anyway. Since you haven't stated a desire to be cloned, being cloned against your will is more likely to be carried out by unethical people relative to ethical people, so even if the prospect is fairly remote it is more worrying than the prospect with cryonics, where caring people must keep you frozen and do have your consent to bring you back.
I fear a rough copy of myself made from my facebook posts (and lesswrong comments) being tortured about as much as I fear an intricate 3d sculpture of me being made and then being used as a target in a gun range. Is that really just me?
I heard that women are difficult to convince when it comes to signing up for cryo. In mentioning cryonics to a dying person, there seems to be a consensus that it's not going to happen. I encountered a post: Years saved: Cryonics vs VillageReach, which addressed my main objection (that the amount of money spent on cryo may be better spent on saving starving children, especially considering that you could save multiple children for that amount of money with high probability whereas you save only one life with low probability by paying for cryo). Now I'm open to being persuaded.
My first instinct was to go read a lot about cryo, but it dawned on me that there are a lot of people here who will want to convince family members, some of them female, to sign up - and these people may appreciate the opportunity to practice on somebody. It has been argued that "Brilliant and creative minds have explored the argument territory quite thoroughly." but if we already know all of the objections and have working rebuttals for each, why is it still thought of as extra difficult to get through to women? If there were a solution to this, it would not be seen as difficult. There must be something that pro-cryo people need for persuading women that they either haven't figured out or aren't good enough at yet.
So, I decided to offer myself for experiments in attempting to convince a woman to sign up for cryo and took a poll in an open thread to see whether there was interest. I don't claim to be perfectly representative of the female population, but I assume that I will have at least some objections in common with them and that persuading me would still be good practice for anyone planning to convince family members in the future. Having a study on persuading women would be more scientific but how do you come up with hypotheses to test for such a study if you have no actual experience persuading women?
So, here is your opportunity to try whatever methods of persuasion you feel like with no guilt, explore my full list of objections without worrying about it being socially awkward, (I will even share cached religious thoughts, as annoyed as I am that I still have them.), and I will document as many of my impressions and objections as I can before I forget them.
I am putting each objection / impression into a new comment for organization. Also, I have decided to avoid reading anything further on cryo, until/unless it is suggested by one of my persuaders.
Well, have fun getting inside my head.