[Nextgrid]

> "companies are using your reading history to target ads" really the same level of dangerous as "your government wants to read all your messages"?

The problem is that companies tracking your every move for the purpose of ad targeting means all that data is concentrated in a single place where the government (or another bad actor) can search through.

[thfuran]

And, at least in the US, the government can and does freely purchase from third parties information that they aren't able to compell disclosure of, so companies accumulating tons of information about everyone is very much a part of the government surveillance apparatus. Without that (and with some better protection of data that actually does need to be collected), national intelligence agencies would probably still coerce access to information they're not meant to have, but at least local police departments wouldn't be able to just buy it from data brokers.