The advantage of giving this authority to google/facebook, and not the government, is that it provides a buffer from the government. These companies, in the pur

The advantage of giving this authority to google/facebook, and not the government, is that it provides a buffer from the government. These companies, in the pursuit of protecting personal data, will not give up data unless the authorities have done the requisite due diligence. As it stands right now, they are all too willing to give up data because they are advertising companies. If they instead became mandated with protecting personal data, then I believe they could be extremely effective at this. Take for example apple, who don't make the bulk of their money off of advertising. Their practices represent the state of the art in digital security, and they are one of the largest tech companies. They manage not just to protect data from other people, but also to protect data from themselves, and therefore from overreaching law enforcement. We don't currently get similar treatment from google, but we couldn't expect similar treatment from the government, were they to move into this space.