A common sense observation downvoted on HN because it's critical of Big Tech? Say it isn't so.

It doesn't seem so.

Comment was originally nearly dead. (Only mostly dead though). The butthurt brigade is out in force on this post.

That applies to anyone. Not just 'companies'

See: Piracy, Speeding, Lesser: Fraud, Theft

I haven't found that to be true. Plenty of people have the capability of shoplifting without getting caught, but very few people do it. Anyone could go on amazon and buy lockpicking tools to steal from their family friends and neighbors when they know they'll be away, but most people wont. Lots of people working with disabled or other vulnerable people could rape them and get away with it, but they usually don't do that either. Sociopaths aside, most people aren't all that comfortable hurting others and that discomfort grows with the severity of the harm. I think that a large part of what makes things different for corporations comes down to diffusion of responsibility and a lack of meaningful consequences.

There's only a chance that a company will be caught at all, and when they are it often ends up still being profitable for them in the end. This makes crimes more attractive to companies than for most people who tend to suffer severe consequences for even minor infractions of the law. If I owe money to someone and I poison them to try and get out of paying what I owe I'd probably go to prison if I were caught. If a company knowingly poisons an entire city's water supply to avoid paying for properly cleaning up their waste products, and they spend years carefully conspiring to hide that fact from the people they're killing, they can get a fine smaller than what it would have cost them to clean up their mess responsibly in the first place.

It's much easier to hurt people or to choose inaction when acting as part of a group and when you've been told to do something by someone perceived to be an authority or someone with a higher level of responsibility. There is also an aspect of self-preservation here too because again, individuals face disproportionately severe consequences. Being a whistleblower, or even just refusing to do what your boss tells you can be extremely costly. It can be career ending. It can mean not being able to support your family, being forced to live on the streets, or being unable to pay for medications you need to survive. Companies can be caught over and over again committing acts which cause real harm to hundreds or even thousands of people at a time, but still continue to operate more or less as usual.

Perhaps the underlying impulse is sometimes similar (many individuals are opportunistic when it comes to small offenses) but the differences in scale, incentives, and the burden of guilt make the behavior of individuals and corporations very different.

The NSA already has all of Google's data... Surely they could be a whistle blower if they wanted to.

But why would they?