I got a lot of pushback on a comment that I left regarding surveillance in another thread yesterday, but I feel especially vindicated by this so I'll repost it

I got a lot of pushback on a comment that I left regarding surveillance in another thread yesterday, but I feel especially vindicated by this so I'll repost it here: --- The main problem I see is that people are completely distracted by privacy from corporations - when what we really need to be worried about is privacy from our own governments. So much ink is spilled talking about cookies, ads tracking, etc. But really what's the worst a corporation is going to do? Try to sell you something? Meanwhile, we continue to allow our governments to regulate and legislate ever more intrusive invasions of our privacy. And they can put us in jail, or worse. This also gets blurry as governments take increasing control of companies, to the point that some are just about arms of the government, surveilling us in ways that the government can't (yet) do on their own - and being forced to pass that data to the government under penalty of law themselves. --- A lot of the pushback I got is that corporations can do bad things with your data, which of course is true. We should strive for privacy in the general sense, from corporations and our government. I just think, especially outside HN, that the the conversation is far too heavily weighted toward corporations when the far greater harm comes from our governments - and almost no time in general public media is given to this. I got some pushback as well that if corporations surveil you, they give your data to the government anyway, so it's important to have privacy from corporations. Which is ironic, since that's much like what I said in my last paragraph. We need privacy generally, but I see law after law and article after article talking about privacy from corporations, while our governments are gaining more and more ground into surveilling us - often with the help of corporations. But let's keep the focus on exactly how our governments are spying on us and try to address that. Ad-targeting is a small problem compared to the bigger issue of government surveillance - often via corporations (even if I agree that corporate spying is also a problem). Let's focus on some laws that take away the governments ability to demand our data from Google, FB, etc. Let's stop allowing our governments to put cameras all over the place. Let's demand that our intelligence agencies stop spying on us with wide nets. Let's stop allowing our police forces to buy sophisticated tracking software and phone break-in software.