[pembrook]

So your position is that, because Coca Cola once funded paramilitary action in South America...companies are a worse threat to us than governments?

You don't seem able to hold two ideas in your head.

Yes, companies can abuse their power. Yes, governments can abuse their power.

However, the power wielded by governments is on a whole different scale, so the capacity for abuse and atrocity is exponentially larger (governments have killed millions and can literally destroy the entire world with firepower 100X over).

[wredcoll]

I agree with you on the general principle that we should demand better privacy protection from the government, its agents, and the corporations that claim its citizenship.

Arguing about who has killed more seems mildly pointless since it relies on a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations. Even aside from stuff like the east indies company, Hearst's newspapers helped create a situation where a war was declared, what share of the resulting death toll do they get?

Beyond that, something I've noticed over my years on this planet is that, generally speaking, power cannot be destroyed, only transferred.

What I mean by that is someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life, in ways that range from what color you can paint your house, where you can buy a house, how much you get paid, whether or not you get paid a salary, how much taxes you pay, etc etc.

I would, in general, prefer that the entity with that power be some kind of democratically elected institution, hopefully with lots of various internal and external safeguards.

As you say, we should be worried about the government collecting and storing our private information. But if we stopped them from doing that, then some other entity would just take over spying on people.

[pembrook]

> power cannot be destroyed, only transferred...someone is going to have power over all sorts of aspects of your life

I fully agree with this, but that someone doesn't need to be a 3rd party centralized entity (like a government or company), the power can be decentralized onto you.

That's the story of basically all progress in the modern world.

The evolution from Monarchy/Dictatorship -> Representative Democracy was a step down this path (albeit a mild one).

The evolution of knowledge from Church -> Printing Press -> Internet did this, hence why I have to the power to publicly broadcast these words to you.

The evolution of media from Broadcast TV -> Cable -> Youtube -> Tiktok did this.

The evolution of commerce from Department Stores -> Malls -> Shopify/Etsy/etc did this.

And AI is currently enabling the next step of this in many new areas.

> a clear cut distinction between "business" and "government" which would be hard to find in a lot of real world situations

I think you're intentionally muddying the waters here.

In fact it's extremely easy to make the distinction between "business" and "government," given the monopoly on violence granted to government. Proctor & Gamble has never held a gun to my head and imprisoned me for not buying their products.