My government evaluates police work by number of cases. What does the police do if there is not enough crime? For example they look at energy usage of people and try to spot patterns that might indicate something like a weed farm. If the pattern match your home will be searched. This is a supposedly civilized western country that managed to start two dictatorships in just one century and had massive problems with surveillance. You can guess the country now...

Today people with similar mindsets control politics and surveillance is increased at every step. A frightful older demographic is part of this. Someone said it would be insanity to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and expect different results...

So far, the only jurisdictions in the developed world who seem to be on a trajectory towards increased or at least not decreased privacy of any type are in Europe.

I'm not sure why it's especially governments. I find this propensity for privacy focused people to overlap with more conservative thinking individuals very perplexing. Especially since typically the more prominent feature of conservatism is support towards large corporations - which are the largest entities removing our privacy.

It's not especially governments for which you need to keep the integrity of your privacy - it's everyone. And I would imagine if we're trying to estimate the entities that pry the most, it's corporations. Sure, they may feed it to governments, but there's an energy barrier there (in at least some circumstances) - but the trust of corporations is one of the bigger issues here.

A steelman of that perspective (full disclosure: I'm leaning more libertarian, but my stance is complicated, and nuanced), is that you can just not use facebook, but government's laws are full liability -they enforce (rather than describe) norms, and stances which can suffocate non-represented minorities, and you can not opt out in ways other than moving.

People are many, and weird, and different; the attention of lawmakers & govs are limited, and this can (and have repeatedly made) roadkill of you, with no recourse other than privacy.

In security, to make an assessment of overall risk of a potential vulnerability, we take into account both the probability, and the impact of exploiting such vulnerability. Facebook, and corporations in general, ultimately want to move merch, and, at worst, make you vote for candidates of their choice: probability of being successful is medium, but impact for the individual is relatively low. Goverment laws can roadkill you: probability of this ranges from low to medium, but impact is super high. This advises for being especially vigilant for gov interventions, especially where freedom, and liberties are concerned.

> just not use facebook,

Good luck on getting Facebook to stop using you though [1].

In a similar vain, how does Equifax fit into this mythical world where government is the problem but corporations are not?

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_profile

Governments have sovereignty, which basically means unlimited capacity to make your life hell.

But, yes, corporations will quite readily sell all that information to the government, anyway, so it doesn't really matter in the end.

I think that is slowly shifting. The misguided trust of conservatives in corporations as an antithetical opponent to government that is.