Comment by pixl97
9 days ago
>A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row.
A private company can 100% do this in many ways. They already do this buy putting up and using their technology in minority areas, for example.
It's a distinction. Private companies are partnering with the government to take away personal liberty.
We should ban the government from accessing data gathered by private companies by default, perhaps. I need to mull on it.
The point is that "who gathers it" should be irrelevant.
The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.
On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.
> The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.
Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?
I also personally think there are some private collections we should ban, or put in place limitations on how it can be used, in the interest of general privacy.
That is trickier to decide on and surely there's room to debate.
Prohibiting (or at least restraining) the de jure government but allowing a parallel corporate de facto government to keep growing (in scope, coercion, and influence) is exactly what has happened here. It's naive to think that the de jure government can always continue to "just say no" to the parallel power structure, keeping it under control of the de jure government. Rather, eventually the corporate government gets powerful enough to overrun the traditional mechanics that keep it subservient, no matter how strong those mechanisms may be. Then the corporate government goes to work subverting, devouring, and replacing the traditional government.
If we had wanted to avoid where we are now at - staring down a full-on fascist dystopia - the surveillance industry ("tech") needed to be nipped in the bud 15+ years ago - with a GDPR-equivalent, and strong anti-trust enforcement that prohibited anti-competitive bundling [proprietary] software with [Metcalfe's law] network services. The surveillance industry's power needed to be constrained to remain in line with our assumptions of natural rights and Constitutionally-limited government.
But a lot of people were being paid a lot of money to not think too hard about the implications of what they were building. And so every time the topic came up in our communities, those on the take would shout it down with a litany of rationalizations about why such constraints were not necessary.