The American paradox is that you often have very good governments, but trust them very little. Where as you often have very evil companies, but trust them very much.

Europe is the opposite.

The EU is working hard to secure citizen rights though, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t working for ways that you can share your data. The EU just wants transparency and ownership to remain with its citizens.

> the American paradox is that you often have very good governments, but trust them very little

That distrust is a reason why our government has been stable over the past 200 years, despite a series of technological, economic, geopolitical and cultural changes.

The two party system also results in dramatically greater stability, typically at a cost trade-off of dynamism. It's hard to change a two party system, so hopefully if you've got one of those, you have something worth maintaining underneath. Systems with lots of parties are far less stable over long periods of time by contrast and are prone to rapid change and takeover. Australia for example, with its 13 parties with parliamentary representation, lately can't keep a leader for more than a year or two, with six prime ministers in a decade. In that extreme case it's causing policy stagnation however, as none of them are managing to tackle big, urgent problems before they're tossed out. Europe's typical preference (excluding a few countries like Russia) toward lots of parties has also resulted in neo-Nazi groups acquiring increasing government power and representation, another downside to that approach.

I believe that near omniscient surveillance is inevitable because it is too easy.

And, as an entirely separate point, because the information is too important — not just for exciting headlines about crime prevention (which is probably one of the last things it will fix in the general case rather than specific things like littering or speeding), but also for the mundane e.g. how to train an AI to do a production line job by watching people do production line work, or monitoring all substance use in real life to determine drug interactions.

I want a social, legal, and political system which takes this into account; one that tries to fight against it will fall to blackmailers, fully automatic payment frauds, and thieves cloning your door key from photographs.

Unlike in the US, we do not take it for granted that being surveilled by corporations is preferable to being surveilled by a democratically elected government.

>It's not lack of data which hinders business in the EU, it's overtaxing small businesses, cronyism, top-down-approaches, Google or something else which is hard to grasp. Lack of ambition? Lack of youth? Foreign espionage/sabotage? Negativity?

Different values.

You still seem to be taking it for granted that being surveilled is inevitable.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation says that it would cost significantly less than the annual budget of the (London UK) Metropolitan police to put every window in London under laser-microphone surveillance.

Likewise, I assume that every sufficiently important person is targeted with some form of surveillance by at least one organised criminal gang interested in either taking their money or corruption, both of which can be achieved by surveillance-enabled blackmail. “Sufficiently” is variable depending on much this tech costs, and it’s constantly getting cheaper.

How does it work without being surveilled? Most common AI use cases require data. A voice assistant needs to know my voice to work, a health assistant would need health data (weight, heart rate, etc), a scheduling assistant would need my schedule, etc etc. Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding your point?

The voice assistant needs to know your voice, but it doesn't need to share it with either a corporation or a government.

Likewise, the health assistant needs your health data, but doesn't need to share it.

The data should be stored on hardware you control, and not shared with anyone else.

It's the difference between using a computer for information keeping and other people using that information for unauthorized and malicious ends.

Which is also what makes surveillance inevitable, as long as everyone is using Someone Else's Computer (the cloud).

Ease of moving to the Bay area is probably a big factor too.

But couldn't it also be that big Bay area companies aren't more American than they are international?

Don't forget Seattle! (Amazon, Microsoft)