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I just love watching people complain about government surveillance while accessing Comcast Internet with Google Chrome on Microsoft Windows on an HP computer th

I just love watching people complain about government surveillance while accessing Comcast Internet with Google Chrome on Microsoft Windows on an HP computer that was shipped by FedEx after being purchased from Amazon over a Motorola phone on a Verizon 4G network with a VISA debit card from FDIC-backed Wells Fargo that was issued after a credit check from Equifax, Experian or TransUnion, using currency controlled by the Federal Reserve System by someone who went to a for-profit college with a Pell Grant. Did I mention they're complaining on a website, owned by another corporation? Which more often than not sells ad space (and user information!) to dozens or hundreds of other corporations? It's comforting to think that these companies don't know everything about you. But right now, a 4 TB hard drive can be bought from NCIX for $159.99. And right now there are 313.9 million US citizens. That means, for $159.99, you could store 14,011 bytes of information per every US citizen. If you don't want the government to look over a company's shoulder at data they've collected, maybe we should make it illegal for companies to collect that information in the first place. I clock the United States Constitution at 19 kB in EPUB format, according to Project Gutenberg. That means that you wouldn't even need two 4 TB hard drives to store an entire copy of the Constitution, for every single US Citizen.

thesis 13y ago
What? Because we rely on a massive infrastructure we aren't allowed to complain about government surveillance? Also not sure how prices for hard drives got brought up. What relevance does cheap disk space have on this?
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  My point was, "If you don't want the government to look over a company's shoulder at data they've collected, maybe we should make it illegal for companies to collect that information in the first place." And, before the age of massive hard drives it was easy to imagine that we were anonymous - that it would be impossible for any government or corporation to keep many records on us. I was highlighting that information is so shockingly cheap to store now, that even your local burger joint could trivially afford to own a database storing a huge amount of information on every single person in this country.

thesis 13y ago

What? Because we rely on a massive infrastructure we aren't allowed to complain about government surveillance? Also not sure how prices for hard drives got brought up. What relevance does cheap disk space have on this?

VikingCoder 13y ago
My point was, "If you don't want the government to look over a company's shoulder at data they've collected, maybe we should make it illegal for companies to collect that information in the first place." And, before the age of massive hard drives it was easy to imagine that we were anonymous - that it would be impossible for any government or corporation to keep many records on us. I was highlighting that information is so shockingly cheap to store now, that even your local burger joint could trivially afford to own a database storing a huge amount of information on every single person in this country.