This reads like parody.
Let's say that states and police forces alone (for the sake of the argument) used to do surveillance.
For the last 2 decades, Google, Facebook, and co ALSO collect data in 1000x the times the data breadth and detail than even Stazi was capable to collect, including collecting data covertly, and abuses it for all kinds of purposes, both aggregated and targeted.
Not to mention that, beyond the surveillance they do for their private interests and business, even the "states and goverments" vs "Google and Facebook" are not even remotely separate from surveillance by states and police forces, cooperating, sharing data, or even ordered to give surveillance data, to both.
> Not to mention that, beyond the surveillance they do for their private interests and business, even the "states and goverments" vs "Google and Facebook" are not even remotely separate from surveillance by states and police forces, cooperating, sharing data, or even ordered to give surveillance data, to both.
I'll grant you that, but I wouldn't call that their business. They probably would do without if they could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...
https://fortune.com/2019/01/28/google-iab-sensitive-profiles...
I will have to disagree here, that is not the dictionary definition of the word. So attempting to call out a serious abuse of language while doing the same thing is definitely an interesting take.
Just like governments can abuse their position, so do corporations. Google absolutely has surveilled society at large and been caught and fined for doing so.
This is a non-inclusive list of reasons why and whom may perform the act "especially by the police or army", "for the purposes of catching criminals"
There are many acts that are defined by 'who' does it. The act of surveillance is not one of them. For example a private investigator can surveil you. A business can do the same by intentional action (for example selling hidden tracking devices to ensure they can find you if you are kidnapped) or unexpected action (your cell phone reports back to a server every 30 seconds of an exact GPS location of where you are).
> an economic system in which the product for sale is personal data collected on the internet, especially from search engines (= programs used to find information on the internet) and social media platforms (= websites and programs that allow people to communicate and share information on the internet)
I think this is the context folks are reaching for: it's not just a data-driven business model, it's driven by people's personal data in particular. As far as sharing willingly, it's _incredibly_ hard to buy a smartphone and prevent it from collecting your personal information (like location, movement patterns, app usage) without removing much of the functionality that makes it useful.
And once that data is collected, it's open season. I just ran across this piece from today where the government literally goes directly to private data brokers because the NSA takes too long: https://www.404media.co/us-counterintel-buys-netflow-data-te...
That particular case is about tracking VPNs (so not directly related to Google's data collection), but is a good example of how we can limit government's reach, but as long as they can buy data from private firms, there's a loophole in the 4th amendment, likely rooted in the third-party doctrine.