[asgard1024]

> I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious

They are certainly not obvious to me. With government, there is a democratic oversight, you can (at least in theory) vote to have these records destroyed or stop collecting them and so on.

However, when private company does it, what kind of control do you have over them? Especially if they are 3rd party.

[DennisP]

The only reason we have any democratic oversight over the NSA's actions is that Snowden broke the law to let us know what they were actually doing.

[jgroszko]

Yeah I don't see why it's better to have private companies hold the data either. Private companies have a different set of incentives, such as mining that data for advertising...

[rev_null]

Government has a monopoly on violence. Private companies do not.

[dragonwriter]

In the theory from which that line originates, it is definitional rather than descriptive: under that theory, whatever has a monopoly on legitimate use of force in a territory is called the State, whether or not it is the thing that purports to be "the government" or not.

[zaccus]

There's a bill of rights and a system of checks and balances that protects me from the government. None of those things exist with private companies, not even in theory.