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by bespoke_engnr
3885 days ago
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I see your point, but I think the counterpoint is that there is a huge difference between 1. getting a warrant and running down to the book shop to ask them about what a single suspect bought, and 2. Having enormous amounts of data collected about hundreds of millions of people, processed and interpreted, essentially sitting in one place. Whether Google voluntarily gives it up or not is almost irrelevant (as we saw, the NSA is happy to tap Google's private fiber without their knowledge even when Google is cooperating on other fronts). Of course the government will find ways to be evil if it wants (and I think that we're generally lucky because it doesn't seem to want to with any particular intensity). But that's not really the point here. It's the difference between having many small, complicated little targets that each yield very little information, versus one conveniently enormous target that yields information on everyone. |
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I structured my previous comment in this way to proactively address the argument that someone always brings up - the story of how Nazi Germany used census data to track down and exterminate Jews. My point being that yes, evil government could use this data to do evil things in an efficient way, but it doesn't mean that we have to proactively stop doing censuses - they have many other, real, actual, positive uses.
Or another example - the best way to prevent a house fire from burning down a neighbourhood is to not build houses near each other. But instead, we invest in firefighters, better materials and procedures, all of which addresses the problem of fire spread. Why? Because we want the houses to be close to each other.