Comment by King-Aaron
8 years ago
I wonder how many of the 16-million East Germans had this same utopian outlook on it..
Edit: While things are "good", I'm sure you and a lot of others don't see an issue. But you're giving yourself a lot of rope to be hung on if ever things become hard.
I guess my view of the situation is that the massive collection of data only becomes a problem in situations where we can absolutely not trust our government, and if things get that bad then we have much bigger problems than the government having a lot of data about us. At that point they don't need evidence of wrongdoing to drag people into the street and shoot them, so it doesn't matter to me if they have it.
The trouble is that they might target a group that you are logged to be a part of. For a concrete example, the reason the Nazis were so successful in finding Jews in the Netherlands is because the government there kept (and keeps, if I'm not mistaken) a list of people and which faith they belong to. That list was then handed over to the invaders, who made really good use of it in the time after.
Nobody before that point really stopped to consider whether or not it was a good idea this data existed in the hands of the people that had it. If they did, they probably thought there was nothing to hide (or even that it was a good idea, perhaps). At this point, we should know better. For the ones targeted, there were no bigger problems than the fact that someone had this data about them.