[gjsman-1000]

Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything? I don't want to live in a society where everything is monitored by people I don't know and haven't heard of secretly, and neither I think do you.

Remember, this wasn't the insurance company that was spying. This was a data broker whom you've never heard of, who scrapes social media pages, and gets paid by insurance companies for reports. A bounty hunter using computers and scraping. That's dystopian.

[refulgentis]

Customers using their speech to praise your business, in the process revealing you committed fraud, and the insurance company hearing the customers, is not "China".

If all this speech was in a central repository by government mandate, I agree it's China

[gjsman-1000]

It's more that I don't think it's the damn business of any private, nameless entity to scrape my social media posts and collect them in a secret database. I signed up for _Facebook_ and their privacy policy, not for anonymous people who can affect me in the real world without due process to save all of my posts and harvest information about me from them. And then link it to all of my profiles from LinkedIn and elsewhere across the internet into one central database they can sell people and my insurance company, because make no mistake that's what they do.

[vagrantJin]

> Yes - because where does it end? China, which has surveillance on anything and everything?

The anti-Chinese rhetoric on HN is starting to grate.

You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China does with surveillance if any?

[alasdair_]

> You don't live in the DPRC. How do you know what China does with surveillance if any?

The same way we know what happened with the SS or the Stazi - lots of detailed evidence, first hand accounts, reports from other intelligence agencies etc.

[vagrantJin]

The thing is, the people you mention have a bone to pick. Its like taking edward snowdens view of America over say...cardi b