[clay_the_ripper]

Sensible regulations around what the government can do/not do in regards to things like facial recognition tech seems like it’s becoming more and more necessary. I am far more worried about privacy invasions/abuse by the government than I am by private companies that seem to get all the press (ie facebook). For the simple reason that 1) facebook can’t arrest me 2) facebook has no incentive other than targeting me with ads 3) facebook is actually incentivized to keep this data to themselves now that future competitors will not be able to Hoover up as much data as facebook did.

On the other hand, governments with the power to mass surveil their citizens has proven to be a horrible idea.

Given the choice, I’ll take the lesser of two evils which is a company that is interested in knowing the things I buy and where I go, for the express purpose of selling better ads. But all the press goes to “let’s break up big tech”. I’d be much more interested in stopping the mass surveillance of citizens by an entity that has the power to kill, imprison, subjugate and arrest, rather than an entity that has the power to target me with ads.

[hedora]

For all intents and purposes, the government has a superset of the data gathered by the big tech firms.

In particular, they have to turn this data over to law enforcement by law.

Separately, law enforcement routinely breaks the law and steals the backend databases these companies gather.

[StanislavPetrov]

>Given the choice, I’ll take the lesser of two evils which is a company that is interested in knowing the things I buy and where I go, for the express purpose of selling better ads.

The choice is the crux of it. I'm not on Facebook, I choose not to have a "smartphone", I don't use free email or other web services that harvest my information and I avoid a variety of other activities that may offer every day conveniences at the sacrifice of my privacy to various corporations. I don't have this choice when it comes to the government.

We can debate exactly where the 4th amendment applies to prevent the government from hoovering up all our data so that they can track us all individually, in real time, and monitor all of our communications and interactions - but nobody can reasonably argue that the 4th amendment doesn't kick in at some point to prohibit this. Its always harder to claw back power the government has claimed than to stop them from claiming new ones. Its also the reason we need more transparency, so that we know exactly what information the government is harvesting and how closely we are being monitored and tracked.

[rjf72]

Have you considered a couple of issues here? The first is that while companies may simply be in the business of harvesting massive amounts of information for advertising today, once they have that data they can use it to whatever end they like. From the legally gray such as manipulating elections to their benefit to the outright illegal such as using that information to gain leverage over politician, media, regulators, influential figures/celebrities, and so on. Kompromot is a term from the KGB era. Yet now private corporations such as Google and Facebook have many magnitudes more information on everybody than the KGB could have ever even imagined possible.

The second is as a peer comment mentioned: information these companies collect is subject to end up in government hands anyhow. People are so quick to forget about the Snowden leaks of things such as PRISM: [Program participation entailed NSA access to] "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information." Examples included email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats, and more. [1] Some of the companies confirmed to be working with PRISM are: Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

I think things like this fall of people's radar because it doesn't get mentioned in the media. But it doesn't get mentioned in the media for the same reason it was never mentioned prior to Snowden either. These programs have not gone anywhere and, if anything, have grown only more expansive. The NSA didn't set up an exobyte scale data storage center [2] on a whim. Everything you submit to a major corporation in the US is something you should equate to submitting to the US government as well.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

[pixl97]

The issue here is it is not an either/or. We commonly run into joint partnerships where the government doesn't have/maintain the data at all. The goverment just 'buys' an answer from the private corporation and the courts ok this behavior.

[tal8d]

For some dark comedy, look into NIST and their resistance to the release of their biometric software purpose built for the FBI. The solution they have since found is the purchase of COTS with contracts explicitly denying any kind of ownership as a result of purchase. We can't have the taxpayers getting too much bang for their buck!