[arthur_pryor]

sometimes it is right to treat scenarios that are fundamentally similar as different beasts in practice when those scenarios are actually happening at very different scales.

i (and many others) believe that surveillance is like this. the effort that it takes to do what your describing does not scale, and cannot be used to implement dragnet surveillance and data collection (unless it's a police state and you have a lot of notetakers). lots of people (myself and many others) think dragnet surveillance (whether by private entities or governments) is a thing to be avoided (because it creates really bad power asymmetries, which i think are inherently a bad thing).

also, i don't think that large companies should be granted the same rights as individuals. just because a person can do a thing on their own doesn't mean that a large entity should be able to do something similar in spirit at thousands or millions of times the scale.