[Ratufa]

The public can do something about it --- people can make it clear that they support (additional) legislation to restrict what information companies can collect and what they can do with it. But, it's not clear that the public is willing to make this an issue that influences their vote enough to overcome resistance to such laws by companies that benefit from collecting and selling personal data.

As for the government vs private company distinction: It seems pretty likely to me that most information that a company collects about a person will, eventually, become available to the government (Gruber touched on this). It may take a warrant, national security letter, or additional legislation for the government to be able to obtain it, but the usefulness of this data for various government functions (e.g. anti-terrorism, tracking fugitives, mining the data for tax cheats, etc) is too high.