Comment by wredcoll
1 day ago
Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
In general I would agree that say, walmart, is mostly interested in encouraging you to shop at their stores more frequently with the information they gather, it's also true that other corporations are currently selling the information they gather to the government.
And, of course, if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power, in the USA this would include things like state governors / attorneys, federal legislators, presidents, etc, all of whom have some level of influence over my information being collected and used.
If I dislike what walmart is doing, my options are considerably more limited. I can lobby for a law to be passed against it or I can essentially wish for it to go out of business.
> Governments can do a lot of things that hurt you, this is a consequence of having power. Giant Corporations can also hurt you because they also have power.
False dichotomy, they are the same Lernaean Hydra.
> if I dislike what e.g. the department of labour is doing with information it's collecting, I can vote for various representatives up and down the hierarchy of power
How has that been going? Did you manage to elect someone, who made a positive change? Let's be charitable - you can pick an example from your life that goes back up to 50 years.
> Your comment seems to frame this as a "two sides issue" as if it was a see-saw and you can only move back and forth between one side and the other with no room for nuance or alternate directions.
No. My point is you should fear centralized power in general, and in exact proportion to the scope of the power being centralized. All power gets abused.
Governments are centralized power on a scale that makes the most powerful corporation on earth look like an ant. Historically AND currently, the worst atrocities come from governments, not companies.
Yet, internet discourse (and new legislation) over the past 10 years has pretended like the biggest threat to us re: data collection is private companies. They are indeed a threat. But they are NOWHERE near the scale of the threat that data collection by governments represents.
This blind spot is part of the reason mass surveillance legislation is being rolled out (largely successfully) everywhere right now.
For example, we've created such a boogieman out of facebook/social media (which, ironically, doesn't even exist anymore as people remember it) that it has manufactured consent among the public for governments building the infrastructure for 1984. A far greater threat to us than micro-targeted face cream ads ever were.
Yeah 'cause we've never had private corporations like Coca Cola or Chiquita Bananas hire paramilitary forces in South America before.
Both large gov't and large corpo are horrible and both should be equally avoided.
So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments?
You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.
Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.
However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).
Wtf are you talking about if NSA PRISM was discovered 10+ years ago which proved all private companies cooperated with govt to spy on you?
You say that govt is holding a gun to citizen's head, but govt also holding a gun at private company's head.