> How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses. The people in control of the companies are the ones steering the government

> How do you figure? Companies are made up of the people the government oppresses. The people in control of the companies are the ones steering the government towards being more oppressive. > Hardly. My argument is that in the absence of Google, the government would still be a mess, and in the absence of the Google datasets, they'd use others (online cycle trackers, credit card data, toll road records, the photos taken by people standing outside Planned Parenthoods and volunteered to the authorities). With the exception of the last, those are all examples of surveillance capitalism that would be solved with the same legal and technological structures. The overwhelming majority of current commercial software would have been considered malware or a virus in the 90s. Real privacy laws (rather than half measures or controlled opposition like gdpr) that prevent gathering any data that isn't essential and pro-cash rather than anti-cash policies would solve these. Even the last is either surveillance capitalsim (cloud based security cameras) or failure of general privacy law and social norms.