We make this distinction all the time in areas like speech and searches, for good reason. The government is the only entity with near-omnipotent power over you. Corporations may be powerful, but they are ultimately restrained by the government’s monopoly on force; the government has no such restraints because it has the monopoly on force. It’s therefore reasonable and prudent to have different, more stringent rules for the government. If someone working for a corporation doesn’t like you, they can’t kill or imprison you (legally). Not so for the government.
With that being said, whether or not anyone at all should be allowed to collect or use this data is also a totally valid topic for discussion and disagreement.
Someone working for the government can't legally kill or imprison you because they don't like you either.
In developed democracies, if you are a citizen, because of the tight restraints put on government power.
Those restraints are, historically, a very new idea, and they are hardly universal even today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforced_disappearance
On the one hand, I fully agree. On the other hand, I also agree with the intuitive argument that it's very strange to let private corporations surveil and gather, buy, and sell information about citizens to exploit for profit, but then say that the government can't buy that same information for law enforcement and national security.
It feels wrong to say that it's fine for someone with only a profit motive to use private data in small, petty ways to extract more profit from someone that's already paid them, but that the duly elected representative government can't use it for big, important things. Or, if law enforcement and national security are too fraught, what about, say, public health policy?
The obvious answer is that corporations shouldn't have access to it either, but that's a much harder sell, and so we're in this weird limbo.