I think it would be wrong to ignore either. Especially since most of the data the government gets is from corporations.
> Corporations showing me better-targeted ads is the least of my troubles.
You're right about that. That data sure isn't only used for ads. Companies use it to decide what services you're allowed to get and under what terms. The policies a company tells you they have are different from the polices they tell others they have. Companies use it to set prices so that what you pay can be different from what your neighbor does for the same goods/services. Companies even use that data to determine how long to keep you on hold when you call them.
Employers use it to make hiring decisions. Landlords use it to decide who to rent to. It's sold to universities who use it to decide which students to accept or reject. It's sold to scammers who use it to select their victims. Extremists use it to target and harass their enemies. Lawyers use it in courtrooms as evidence in criminal cases and custody battles. Insurance companies use it to raise rates and deny claims.
The data companies are collecting about will cost you again and again in more and more aspects of your life. Ads are absolutely the least of your troubles.
I’ll take power being consolidated in a democratically elected government over a privately controlled corporation any day of the week.
Let’s put the spotlight on the stuff that isn’t democratically controlled, and subject to much more limited oversight.
Yep. Treating the two as distinct makes no sense. Corporate dragnet surveillance collecting forever-datasets isn't meaningfully different from the government doing the same thing, directly. People who fear government power ought to support outlawing corporate collection of the same types of things they don't want government collecting.
Granted that's relying on the government to prevent corporations from doing things in order to limit... the government (and, incidentally and IMO beneficially, also the corporations themselves). However, that's the only effective mechanism we've got—and the basis of all the other mechanisms we have available, ultimately, short of violence and strikes and such—and I think it's implausible that, even assuming a great deal of bad-faith behavior, such a move wouldn't significantly curb this activity.
If you have any contemporary examples of the way the government has used the same information, in a way that’s been more widely destructive, I would be curious to know more.
Right now they just write fat checks to Google, Apple, Amazon and the telcos and badda bing, badda boom it's done.
Do we not agree that corporate America and other special interest groups essentially control Washington via lobbying and corruption?
Do we not agree that a US citizen has (nominally) more leverage over their government than over an unaccountable private collective?
I mean, we are half a century deep into this Reaganite "your government is your enemy" experiment.
For the record I agree with the grandparent post's question: at least, gov is _supposed_ to be controlled by the citizenry through elections, corporations are not. I can have ("should have") visibility into what the government is doing, corporations can hide (and do hide) as much real information as they can and there's no way for me to get to it.
Whether it's naive of me to think so or not is not what is being discussed here.
Corporations showing me better-targeted ads is the least of my troubles.