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by Cthulhu_ 2317 days ago
And by extension a government, see the Nazis (invoking Godwin's Law here), but also the Snowden revelations - you can safely assume the NSA and co have access to all data held by the big tech companies. If Trump or his even more extreme successors decide that a certain demographic needs to be rounded up, they can requisition a dataset from Facebook and they'd have the list of people matching that description. Combine that with the military + the militarization of the US' police force and you realize you're only one executive order away from genocide. And I don't know if the world will go to war with the US over that.
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logicchains 2317 days ago
So the problem with Facebook is that powerful governments might use their data to do horrible things, and the solution is to give governments even more power over our lives by letting them dictate what sites we're allowed to visit? If there wasn't so much of this "oh no, a problem, better get the government to solve it" thinking in the first place, the US government would never have gotten as powerful as it has.
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lagadu 2317 days ago
> "oh no, a problem, better get the government to solve it"

Erm, that's exactly why we have governments: to solve society-level problems.

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logicchains 2317 days ago
Yes but governments also cause problems, and if they get big enough the cure can be worse than the disease. E.g. if all governments in Europe had not had the power to override citizens' freedom of choice by drafting them and taking their factories to make bombs, there'd have been no WW1, saving tens of millions of lives. If Russian and Chinese governments in the 20th century had not had the power to override their citizen's freedom of choice and expropriate their property, Stalin would not have been able to conduct his purges, Mao would not have been able to conduct his great leap forward, the great famine would have been avoided, saving close to a hundred million lives.

As the quote goes, "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.". People think "oh it couldn't happen here"; well that's what people in Germany thought in the 1930s.

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