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> I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious They are certainly not obvious to me. With gover
by asgard1024 11y ago
> I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious
They are certainly not obvious to me. With government, there is a democratic oversight, you can (at least in theory) vote to have these records destroyed or stop collecting them and so on.
However, when private company does it, what kind of control do you have over them? Especially if they are 3rd party.
- DennisP 11y agoThe only reason we have any democratic oversight over the NSA's actions is that Snowden broke the law to let us know what they were actually doing.
- rev_null 11y agoGovernment has a monopoly on violence. Private companies do not.
- dragonwriter 11y agoIn the theory from which that line originates, it is definitional rather than descriptive: under that theory, whatever has a monopoly on legitimate use of force in a territory is called the State, whether or not it is the thing that purports to be "the government" or not.
- zaccus 11y agoThere's a bill of rights and a system of checks and balances that protects me from the government. None of those things exist with private companies, not even in theory.
- jgroszko 11y agoYeah I don't see why it's better to have private companies hold the data either. Private companies have a different set of incentives, such as mining that data for advertising...