[dllthomas]

"should the government know less than Google[?]"

It's an interesting framing but I don't think a correct one.

To the question itself, in some areas the government should absolutely know less than other groups/individuals. My wife should know a lot more about me than the government does, and she does very little data mining.

To the framing, though, just as there's a tremendous difference between "follow that car" and "follow every car" (http://www.schneier.com/essay-109.html), there's a tremendous difference between "knowing what Google knows" and "knowing what Google knows plus what Facebook knows plus what Apple knows plus what Twitter knows plus what Verizon knows plus ...".

[malandrew]

Google mainly knows the things it tells it. Government should be the same. I tell the government about my taxes. They should know that because I gave them that information. I didn't give them my search information, so they should not have that without a court-approved search warrant. If they want my search history without one, they should ask me directly for it and I should have the right to deny them that information.

[dllthomas]

That's a pretty clear statement of "what," and I'm not at all sure I disagree, but can you get into "why"?

[malandrew]

Utility in the form of purchasing goods and services.

I give information to google because it provides me utility. They take my searches and everyone else's, aggregate them and sell that information to advertisers. That allows me to keep using Google for free. If the information were not in aggregate, I would opt for paying for search services because individual privacy has value to me. I also trust Google just enough to know that my information will be lumped in with everyone else's or that Google will provide a black box where advertisers can tell Google who they want to reach and Google will deliver the message without ever informing that advertiser of who I am. If I choose to reveal myself to that advertiser later, that's my prerogative.

With the government, I pay taxes because the taxes pay for a lot of services the government provides me with [0]. I get things like roads, civil servants, police, firehouses, education, etc.

I don't provide them with my personal info because doing so does not provide me with any utility. One could argue that providing them with my info via dragnet provides increased safety for me. The merits of this are arguable, but even then the merits are irrelevant to me because the utility I gain if any far outweigh my losses in terms of privacy, and even more importantly, outweigh the ability for society to progress if there 100% perfect and immediate prosecution of all crimes that would come out of perfect surveillance. My privacy and more importantly the privacy of my fellow Americans is worth far far more than the safety benefit of any dragnet.

[0] What bothers me with my taxes is that I can't perform a "vote" every time I file my taxes where I play "divide the dollar" with my taxes. I would love to be able to tell congress exactly how to spend my tax dollars. In my case, military and surveillance spending would get maybe 1-4% of my dollar, not the 33% currently spent on those activities. Voting for representatives is half the battle. Voting for how I let those representatives spend money is the other half.