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by firasd 4219 days ago
A couple differences that I believe are relevant:

a) Bank balances are a more controlled system from the beginning. They 'know' how much is in your account and when you transfer it they 'know' how much and to whom. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook and so on are not keeping active track of the nature of your conversations within chat and email in such a tightly controlled way. When I say "Hey, what's up" to a friend in Facebook Messenger it's not treated by FB as a bank would treat my sending the friend $200. (I realize this gets a bit ambiguous because the message is still recorded in a database and parsed for advertising...)

b) The activities we engage in on Facebook, Gmail, WhatsApp and the like overlap with speech and social relationships which are usually given more protection and consideration in society than specific transfers of items or materials (like cash, physical items, and so forth.) Imagine your local police tracking everyone's movement, conversations and social relationships in the neighborhood "just in case"—that'd raise concerns! Meanwhile a store owner keeping inventory of every sale is just seen as expected behavior.
1 comments
Swizec 4219 days ago
> Meanwhile, Google, Facebook and so on are not keeping active track of the nature your conversations within chat and email in such a tightly controlled way.

The question is, should they? I'm sure banks weren't always as tightly regulated and didn't keep as tight a track of everything as they do now.

Should we ask web giants to start behaving in a more regulated way for various reasons ranging from the ability to get alibi from "I posted this on Facebok at X and couldn't possibly have been where you say I was", to the ability to have court evidence of what people were/are up to. If data isn't kept to a certain standard it becomes too unreliable in such cases.

On the other hand, do we actually need banks to have such a tight control over everything? Yes, we expect it. But do we need it?

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firasd 4219 days ago
In terms of court evidence, I believe internet companies are responsive to warrants (although some fight requests they consider unreasonable with more vigor than others.)

My reading of the article suggests this is more about active and ongoing surveillance, which gets into greyer areas (the feasibility of such monitoring, potential bias in algorithms, as well as issues like the concept of "pre-crime" and the legal concept of "prior restraint"...)

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