You can also request it be destroyed:
https://www.health.mil/Military-Health-Topics/Research-and-I...
I wouldn't trust either form over the other though, and if anything, I'd want their incentives to be set up so they were mostly in opposition so as to limit the power of each other.
If I was to pick an abstract group to trust, it surely would be family first.
Which is saying that you can only have a "vote" if you're wealthy enough. That doesn't seem like an actual solution to me.
> and you can decide to spend (or not) your money with a company.
Which is what I do, but doing that doesn't affect the company's behavior.
No, it's saying you can vote if you buy a share. Are you saying that wealthy individuals in a democracy don't have an outsized advantage in shaping policy and the behaviour of government? But they have the same voting rights as you or me, so there must be something else going on…
> doing that doesn't affect the company's behavior.
You're saying that withholding your money from a company has no effect on its behaviour? Try cancelling a long standing account with a company today, like your phone provider, and see if it provokes any kind of response. You might get a free upgrade out of it.
Even if it were your local town, city, or county government managing it, do you think they're going to fight the federal government if they ask for access to it? Over you, a nobody, when the Federal Government is going to threaten to withhold money for whatever if they don't?
Anything too big isn't democratic as much as political spending, alluring promises (that will be broken), campaigning, making the others look more evil than you, etc etc
That's just one small example.
In any case, the government having this data and a private, for profit company having this data feels like two quite different things.
As have private companies.
Government? Who knows - whatever behavior emerges when you get a bunch of self promotors, egotists and idealists to compete amongst each other for whatever it is that each is individually competing for.
When a company is sold or is subject to the interests of people divorced from the original mission and values of the company, problems will likely emerge.
I guess my point is that you can't really trust anybody, because humans are the fundamental building block of both corporations and government, and their personal or collective self interests emerge to create issues regardless of their structure or purpose.
Sure. But in context of privacy, tell me, what personal value system is reflected in companies that suck in and process that data? I mean the marketing, the adtech, the data brokerage companies? Being charitable, I imagine it's "do well unto my customers (i.e. other companies); everyone else is irrelevant". Which I guess is defensible under the moral framework exploitative capitalism, but that doesn't satisfy me as one of those "everyone else" whose data gets processed. That people in companies that abuse my data have work ethics is not reassuring me in the slightest.
> When a company is sold or is subject to the interests of people divorced from the original mission and values of the company, problems will likely emerge.
I think almost all of companies are like that. In particular, VC-funded startups are like that from the day one - the investors are absolutely "divorced from the original mission and values of the company".
> their personal or collective self interests emerge to create issues regardless of their structure or purpose.
And my point is that if you look at the structure of these self interests, how they flow in the vector field of incentives, and if you look at what capabilities peoples, companies and governments have, the picture is pretty predictable: private companies will, on average, screw you over always, incessantly; governments (at least the western kind) will be friendly most of the time, but if and when they do decide to screw you up, the immediate consequences will be much worse.