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My issue with the term is that governments are, and will ever be more invasive with our private data than private companies. This makes sense: the government wi
by Hakashiro 7y ago
My issue with the term is that governments are, and will ever be more invasive with our private data than private companies. This makes sense: the government will never be held accountable for data hoarding, and in fact kinda needs to hoard data to prosecute tax fraud and ensure law enforcement, but private businesses want to make sure people still use them, even if their users are privacy conscious.
Moreover, a bunch of fully for-profit companies are living off of exclusively selling privacy. Their only reason to exist is protecting their customer's information. Think ProtonMail, Tutanota, TunnelBear, privacy.com, the Mozilla Foundation (to a certain extent), Qwant, DuckDuckGo, and so on and so forth.
I very much preferred the previous term: "Government Surveillance". As some other comments on this page also pointed out, this loss of privacy comes with the benefit of productivity and reduced friction, while government surveillance rarely ever has a positive side to it (except catching criminals, and even so at the expense of non-criminals' privacy).
- Hakashiro 7y agoI forgot to add a very important remark. You can opt out of companies collecting your data by blocking trackers or not using their services. Doing the same to protect your privacy from the government is tax fraud and is considered a crime. I think we have bigger issues than Facebook knowing what web articles we read, honestly.
- encom 7y agoKey difference: You elect your government, and if you aren't happy with how they're doing things, you can vote them out. I never voted for Zuckerberg, Bezos, Cook or whoever runs Google.
- fbonetti 7y agoIf you aren't happy with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc, you can choose not to be a customer of them. You can't opt out of paying taxes.
- hellisothers 7y agoFacebook shadow profiles would suggest otherwise
- encom 7y agoI'm not a customer of Google nor Facebook, but they're still tracking me all over the internet.
- mercer 7y agoI'm assuming you're intelligent on account of being able to write a comment and doing so on HN. Have you really never heard of FB's shadow profiles and the like? Are you being wilfully ignorant?