Ironically, it's government that should be protecting the privacy of its citizens against the pervasive surveillance big tech has essentially normalised and monetised.

And so monetised has it become that any attempt by government to reign in the pervasive surveillance, it could potentially have a noticeable effect on the employment rate as all those "smartest people on the planet working very hard on getting better click rates" in the big tech surveillance industry are legislatively made redundant. Bad politics.

This would also dry up a fair portion of the ... lobbyist funding ... governments receive.

Plus governments handily use these private enterprises profiting from pervasive surveillance to take the pulse of the citizenry for the purposes of staying in power - the very reason they're in government in the first place.

So, yeah, Government, as they are, are a significant part of the problem from a number of angles.

Any data collected by big tech can be accessed by governments and governments will manage that data using big tech products so there's not that much distinction between the two.

They're not even close to comparable. Worrying about privacy and then focusing on Big Tech is like trying to swat away a mosquito while you're being devoured alive by three bears.

A huge amount of government surveillance either depends on Big Tech contractors or explicitly leverages Big Tech's disregard for privacy. For example "geofence warrants" wouldn't be possible if Big Tech wasn't collecting and storing all that location data in the first place.

Let's rein in Big Tech. Now what? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to leave it at that and not seek alternative paths? I do not understand how anyone is more eager to address something that merely facilitates the problem than the actual problem itself.

>Big Governments are other threat that, IMO, it's much harder to fight against it.

Whenever people complain about Big Government I like to remind them that any attempt at regulating industries like Big Tech is decried by the owner class as "Big Government", which is often parroted by conservatives, libertarians, and other pro-business groups.

So is it Big Government when it protects the interests of Big Industry to the detriment of its country's people, or Big Government when it regulates it to protect the interests of the people? They can't both be the same thing, and I would argue what most people call "Big Government" is what they've been told to call it, namely the regulation of corporate interests. Nobody ever calls the consistent erosion of people's individual rights "Big Government".

> Whenever people complain about Big Government I like to remind them that any attempt at regulating industries like Big Tech is decried by the owner class as "Big Government", which is often parroted by conservatives, libertarians, and other pro-business groups.

I disagree. Big Government means the government getting into every subject possible. The opposite of this is that you have a government that only enters into essential matters for the well-being of society.

> enters into essential matters for the well-being of society.

Which has poorly defined boundaries because people disagree on essential.

In practice "Big Government" is used only for PR value. It sometimes seems the more a politician or policy wonk uses it, the more they are actually likely to increase government spending when they are in power.

Most people seem to use "Big Government" to mean they don't like something the government is supporting or regulating, and "Essential Government Function" to mean something they want the government to pay for or regulate.

I don't know what's the difference supposed to be.

A void of power never creates a favorable outcome for the common person. If there's room for commercial activity in the area, you can expect all sorts of unethical tactics to eventually surface, like we see in cryptocurrency. In a free-for-all capitalism people will lie and scam and cheat for profit.

So I don't really know what could the government get out of that would make things better.

>or Big Government when it regulates it to protect the interests of the people?

We (the "owner class," parrots, what have you) would argue for the government regulating itself, not the companies. Facebook showing you fursuit ads as a result of your history isn't as big of a problem as the government showing up at your door now that you've shared the wrong idea online. Governments should not be allowed to indiscriminately collect data from (that is, to spy on) it's citizens. Giving the governmemt more power doesn't seem like the right solution here, being that that is exactly what we are trying to limit. Data should not be shared to other countries (like GDPR) and in the US itself it should not be collected by the government.

As near as I can tell, when people complain about "big government", what they're really complaining about is just the government doing things that they dislike.

I've never heard anyone decry "big government" in response to governmental actions that they like, so I don't think it's usually a principled position.

And big government, which demands information in many cases by law, is terrible at keeping that info "safe" in its hands once it's been collected.

Taking the U.S. federal government as an example, by my count we've already seen over 60 notable breaches in just this young decade: https://github.com/MattHJensen/US-gov-info-losses. Certainly many others have gone unreported or unnoticed.