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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

Ok, so these facts are true:

#1. The government is monitoring us.

#2. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and many other huge corporations are also monitoring us... And they are sharing our personal data with each other.

Why are so many news articles about issue #1 and so few are about issue #2. The government is a negligible threat compared to corporations. It seems like tech companies are manipulating the media to turn people against the government and divert attention away from themselves.

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Big corporations don't generally share data with each other. It's more like the government, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and numerous black hat spyware vendors are all monitoring you, and none of them trust anybody else. People inside Google were fucking pissed when the NSA spying practices were revealed, people inside Apple regularly block Google's apps for privacy concerns, people inside Google are regularly battling against spyware, people inside Facebook try to get you to share everything about you and your friends voluntarily while Google tries to provide alternatives that don't involve giving Facebook the keys to your life (but do involve giving them to Google), people inside Microsoft copy & scrape Google to try and grab whatever data Google happens to have, people inside the government are spying on all of the above.

Believing that everybody is out to get you is a sign of paranoia. Believing that people and organization act in their own self-interest is generally a pretty accurate model.

I don't think everybody is out to get everybody else in a homogeneous manner. There is obviously a higher degree of collaboration between similar entities.

I think it's pretty obvious that we have the government on one side and corporations on the other.

We need to make sure that a healthy equilibrium stays in place between the two. Right now I just feel that corporations are winning.

That's not actually true, at all. The tightest bonds of collaboration are usually within a team, and the next tightest are between a product team and its users. It's not unusual for a department to take its users' side against the rest of the same corporation, like for example when Google Search levied an SEO penalty against Google Chrome, or how Google PageSpeed marks many Google sites as slow.

It's also not unusual for organizations to collaborate on one aspect and compete on another. On one hand, Google is in fairly tight with the Obama administration, with the HealthCare.gov rescue & USDS being largely led by ex-Google and ex-Twitter engineers on temporary leave. On the other, all the tech companies banded together to encrypt everything when they found out the NSA was snooping on their wire links.

I used to believe as you did, dividing big entities up into "government" and "corporations", but then personal experience in a big corporation and a lot of friends in government showed me that this is not at all how the world operates. Ultimately it's a lot more chaotic, and the default state in most relationships is "frenemy".

I see this comment as more like diverting attention away from what the government is doing. If the companies' data collection is bothering us, we should regulate it. One easy and onerous data requirement could be to require sharing all data you store about someone with the person when requested. So linked in and Facebook would need to share all the shadow profiles that create about non users but also the advertising signals they store about us. Make it easy and profitable for someone to whistleblow if there non compliance and award them lets say $10MM per non compliance.

OK now let's talk about the government. Remember when China PR put microphones in taxis for the Olympics? Do we aspire to become that?

#3. Other countries are spying on us and are sharing the data with our government...

Yes, but my point is that this is done in the interest of national/international security (there is no financial incentive for the government).

Corporations do their monitoring purely for their own financial gain.

The government is like a parent watching a child to make sure that the child doesn't get hurt - The interests of the parent are aligned with those of the child. A corporation is more like a pedophile - The interests do not align.

The government is not your parent. The government lies to the public constantly, and has an agenda that is largely determined by financial interests.

> The government is like a parent watching a child

I think it's great that you've lived in a bubble all your life.

But you should make a conscious decision whether to remain in that bubble, or find out the truth about the world around you.

Because the truth is an ugly thing these days.

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