It's a distinction. Private companies are partnering with the government to take away personal liberty.
We should ban the government from accessing data gathered by private companies by default, perhaps. I need to mull on it.
We should ban the government from accessing data gathered by private companies by default, perhaps. I need to mull on it.
The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.
On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.
Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?
That is trickier to decide on and surely there's room to debate.
If we had wanted to avoid where we are now at - staring down a full-on fascist dystopia - the surveillance industry ("tech") needed to be nipped in the bud 15+ years ago - with a GDPR-equivalent, and strong anti-trust enforcement that prohibited anti-competitive bundling [proprietary] software with [Metcalfe's law] network services. The surveillance industry's power needed to be constrained to remain in line with our assumptions of natural rights and Constitutionally-limited government.
But a lot of people were being paid a lot of money to not think too hard about the implications of what they were building. And so every time the topic came up in our communities, those on the take would shout it down with a litany of rationalizations about why such constraints were not necessary.