> There is a fair number of companies that I trust more than the US government.

Assuming a US jurisdiction and companies with US presence, the trust you can place in a company is a strict subset of the trust you can place in the government.

Remember companies only exist as enabled by various laws and the government can and will use court orders or even NSLs to extract whatever information it wants from the companies.

That’s not entirely true: They cannot extract information that the company doesn’t have, which would often come up if the company was careful to not capture it in the first place.

> That’s not entirely true: They cannot extract information that the company doesn’t have

For that data, you're not trusting the company with it either since they don't have it.

Sure, but how big is the overlap of that set of companies and the set of companies the US government would pick? It's not really a matter of which you trust more if you're being asked to trust both anyway.