> One is a mere annoyance. The other is a direct threat to your life, liberty, and property. Yes, but these are not compartmentalized how they should be. The

> One is a mere annoyance. The other is a direct threat to your life, liberty, and property. Yes, but these are not compartmentalized how they should be. The government has some limits on what data they can gather/store on you (mostly it seems these limits are respected less and less, but at least they exist and you have some chance to fight for them in court on constitutional grounds). Private industry has no such limits. So they gather everything. But there are also no limits to how they can resell your private data, so a lot of it is resold to.. the government. Which gives a clean backdoor to bypassing those pesky limits. Unless proven otherwise, you should assume that any of your private personal data gathered by private industry is also likely being passed on to the government.