Traffic cameras can read and track license plate numbers, how is that private?
Also, only the government can generally turn a plate number into a person's identity reliably (I doubt Google knows my license plate, though I'd be interested to know if they did), and even then, a license plate is far less likely to always identify a given person's movements than their phone's GPS.
Speed cameras in the US aren't just radar, they photograph you, and even mail you a photo of yourself when you're caught speeding. This has lead to famous cases, like when a guy was caught speeding, and his home was mailed a speeding ticket of him in the car with his mistress, which his wife opened the mail.
Seems to me you're now hand waving away the long recognized danger of government surveillance, as in, actual danger, wherein government sanctions you based on surveillance, as opposed to theoretical dangers of someone showing you a Nike ad.
So while you're worrying about GDPR, this is happening: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-big-brother-state-sur...
The government has problems but trends towards the people's benefit in the long run. Corporate greed trends towards enriching the lives of sick and disturbing rich men like Larry and Sergey.
Corporations are a far worse and far less regulated threat than government, with far less checks and balances in place to protect us. Throwing out the government bogeyman hasn't worked on me before and isn't going to work on me now.
How do you know the cameras aren't recording? How do you know the resolution isn't lowered before being made public? How do you know there aren't other cameras that aren't made public?
If you're going to use a threat model that assumes malice on a "trusted" organization, you should do so for all such organizations: whether they be google or a government. It's only if you assume google isn't trustworthy, but governments are, that your threat model makes sense.
If you don't make that particular set of assumptions (and even if you do in many cases!) differential privacy is a net win.
FOIA. That falls into the whole part where government has checks and balances that Google does not.
How are those FOIA requests for stingray usage and tracking information going? Still blocked, last I checked. Like I keep saying: these arguments only work if you assume that the usg is all sunshine and rainbows, which is a naive assumption to make.
If you're willing to call NetPAC bad, which you do, you've got to agree that it's only bad if the people taking money do so and support the $badthings you claim google does, by not outlawing them. But if they're corrupt enough to do that, why aren't they corrupt enough to torpedo a few FOIA requests?
To put it another way if google is so bad, and you can't even get the USG to police google, how can you expect them to police themselves?
This was a recent story I read: https://cdt.org/blog/digital-is-different-pole-camera-ruling...
Meanwhile, Google hid Dragonfly from the internal team that was supposed to review it's projects for ethics issues. And it was pressure from journalists, and then the US Congress that inevitably forced Google to shut it down.
Thankfully, despite NetPAC, it looks like enforcement for Google is finally coming. The hand of justice moves slow, unfortunately, but it eventually gets there.
No. It was pressure from employees, employees who had ethical concerns. Employees who, I'll note, you consistently badmouth for continuing to work at Google. It's not like a journalist just magically inferred that Dragonfly was a thing one day and wrote an article one day. And Congress had almost nothing to do with it, lmao.
> The government doesn't "police themselves", the system of checks and balances ensures one branch polices another
That's true for things that aren't FOIA. But you mentioned FOIA. Which exists as a way for the executive to police themselves. The courts do exist as a check on the executive, (and local governments). So again, how are those stingray FOIA requests going? Note also that "law enforcement" is an FOIA exemption.
> This was a recent story I read: https://cdt.org/blog/digital-is-different-pole-camera-ruling....
This was a targeted piece of tracking that requires a warrant. Dragnet monitoring often does not require a warrant. In other words, setting up a single camera to monitor a single house needs a warrant. Setting up a hundred cameras to monitor the public doesn't, although getting data from them to target a specific person might, at least if it was being used to imprison them. When was the last time Google imprisoned anyone again?
It's also really, really amusing to see you claim that Google is subject to no public accountability. There are absolutely ways you could try to hold Google accountable, if you actually think that they've done something wrong. You just need to be able to convince a Judge. Same as for the executive branch of the government.
But apart from that leak, it was Congress, not employees, that shut down Dragonfly. Google is happy to dismiss employee concerns, as they've done over and over again. But after Sundar was dragged into Congress and repeatedly questioned about helping China, shockingly, Dragonfly disappeared. It's very revisionist to suggest Google shut it down to placate their own employees, rather than avoid action from Congress.
Remember that after some 20% of Google's employees walked out with a list of demands, Google dismissed 6/7ths of those demands without any further comment on the matter... and the employees didn't do anything further to retaliate. Google is well aware that ignoring employee complaints works, but ignoring Congress does not.
People can barely get their stuff back from civil asset forfeiture. Local and state governments are often far more corrupt and less transparent.
Meanwhile, I'd like to request Google's search algorithm, and any emails revolving Google's discussion of searches for "mapquest". Any takers?
Which is to say, suggesting FOIA isn't all-inclusive is a pretty bad logical fallacy, when Google is subject to no public accountability whatsoever.
https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
"For people whose property has been seized through civil asset forfeiture, legally regaining such property is notoriously difficult and expensive, with costs sometimes exceeding the value of the property. "
Anyone with a long history on the internet, and in civil libertarian, privacy, and security circles would be aware of the long history of abuses, including targeting internet activists. Local law firms in the 80s and 90s, often pushed local governments to use CAF to seize computers from people suspected of piracy or hacking, often without evidence or conviction.
In a country with the highest per capita incarceration rate in the modern world, with a trail of dead and damaged bodies around the globe from military adventures, with systemic racism still in force today, and kids separated from parents and held in internment camps, some unable to even be reunited with parents and turned into orphans, I don't want to hear how easy it is to reign in our government because the evidence suggests restraint has been largely a failure.
The fact of the matter is, our government is not being checked and balanced, not by the legislatures, not by the fifth estate (news media), and not by the people. So on my hierarchy of needs: fighting climate change, war, poverty, gun violence, racism, disease, malnourishment, lack of access to healthcare and education, all of which are being held up by forces that have captured the government and by the apathy of the people and even the news media these days, your obsession that ad targeting is the top evil, and that the other things will be taken care of by oversight, rings hollow.
We are still living with the Patriot Act, the AUMF, National Security Letters, the Five Eyes agreements that enable problems like MUSCULAR, and that's been going on for 18 years now. Do I think FOIA requests will reign this in? Even Snowden didn't really reign it i much. And things like widespread automatic license plate readers and face detection being used by local governments, like with the voting machine changes, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, will largely be installed with only a wimper.