Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Program in the Bay Area

Re:Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Progra... by nostrademons on Saturday May 14, 2016 @10:06PM (#11699035)

Big corporations don't generally share data with each other. It's more like the government, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and numerous black hat spyware vendors are all monitoring you, and none of them trust anybody else. People inside Google were fucking pissed when the NSA spying practices were revealed, people inside Apple regularly block Google's apps for privacy concerns, people inside Google are regularly battling against spyware, people inside Facebook try to get you to share everything about you and your friends voluntarily while Google tries to provide alternatives that don't involve giving Facebook the keys to your life (but do involve giving them to Google), people inside Microsoft copy & scrape Google to try and grab whatever data Google happens to have, people inside the government are spying on all of the above.

Believing that everybody is out to get you is a sign of paranoia. Believing that people and organization act in their own self-interest is generally a pretty accurate model.

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Re:Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Progra... by jondubois on Saturday May 14, 2016 @10:17PM (#11699066)

I don't think everybody is out to get everybody else in a homogeneous manner. There is obviously a higher degree of collaboration between similar entities.

I think it's pretty obvious that we have the government on one side and corporations on the other.

We need to make sure that a healthy equilibrium stays in place between the two. Right now I just feel that corporations are winning.

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Re:Hidden Microphones Part of Government Surveillance Progra... by nostrademons on Saturday May 14, 2016 @10:33PM (#11699107)

That's not actually true, at all. The tightest bonds of collaboration are usually within a team, and the next tightest are between a product team and its users. It's not unusual for a department to take its users' side against the rest of the same corporation, like for example when Google Search levied an SEO penalty against Google Chrome, or how Google PageSpeed marks many Google sites as slow.

It's also not unusual for organizations to collaborate on one aspect and compete on another. On one hand, Google is in fairly tight with the Obama administration, with the HealthCare.gov rescue & USDS being largely led by ex-Google and ex-Twitter engineers on temporary leave. On the other, all the tech companies banded together to encrypt everything when they found out the NSA was snooping on their wire links.

I used to believe as you did, dividing big entities up into "government" and "corporations", but then personal experience in a big corporation and a lot of friends in government showed me that this is not at all how the world operates. Ultimately it's a lot more chaotic, and the default state in most relationships is "frenemy".

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