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Comment by bifrost | Hacker News Reader

This is sortof hillarious, Google fighting for this when they mine ALL of your data...

The government has a monopoly on violence. They can kill you, send you to gitmo, take all of your money and possessions, etc.

Google by comparison can turn off your gmail account.

Depending on what precisely they do with the data, they could do things quite a bit more damaging than turning off your Gmail account, though it certainly wouldn't rise to the level of sending you to gitmo. The worst would probably be some kind of financial and/or career blackballing, if they sold data-mined information about you to credit agencies, lenders, private investigators, and/or prospective employers, and something particularly damaging were contained in it.

I believe their privacy policy currently says they won't do that, and it's especially clear that they won't do anything except target ads using information mined out of your email. But I don't think there would be anything illegal about it, as long as they didn't do something like outright blackmail (offer to let you pay to expunge negative information or something).

The difference is that if Google did that, everyone would immediately stop giving them that information, which is worth more to them than the advantage they could gain in screwing you over once.

On the other hand, if the government does this, people can do... what, exactly? Stop giving their information to the government? They didn't willingly do that to begin with. Stop giving it to Google? Maybe, but they would have to stop giving it to anyone, which is a lot more difficult than just switching from one service to another.

Well if you're willing to talk about illegal things the government could do to you it makes sense to talk about the illegal things Google could do to you; i.e., anything.

Our government has decided that it is allowed to do all of those things "legally" in certain circumstances. Execution, asset forfeiture, and detainment are all considered "legal". Nothing besides the government is permitted to do these things, they have a monopoly on that right.

You don't need to put scare quotes around words, I'm well aware of the potential legality of all three categories.

Slavery used to be legal too. I'm sorry the government is not completely perfect, but the answer is to go fix it and make things that should not be legal, illegal. Until then it's like complaining about shell companies used by Google and Facebook to avoid paying taxes (a strategy typically well-defended on HN because they're "technically complying with the law").

> The government has a monopoly on violence.

No, it doesn't.

People who aren't the government, and who lack its sanction in doing so, apply violence every day.

And they can be/are prosecuted/jailed/shot/hanged/poisoned/electrocuted for that by the government.

If you have an actual monopoly on violence, you don't need to retaliate against other people using violence with your own violence, because there aren't other people using violence.

Now, perhaps the government has a monopoly on legitimate use of force (indeed, Max Weber used that as the criteria to define whether an entity was the government of a particular territory).

The legitimacy of an act (violence in this case) is highly subjective. The legality is a lot more objective. In this particular scenario, I think I would rather say that the government has a legal monopoly on violence. The legitimacy argument breaks down for oppressive governments where some revolting citizens take up violence because they see it as their last and only option. Some might argue that their act is legitimate, but it is still illegal. Now, one could always say that if the violence by government is not legitimate, it is no longer a government. But that is largely a philosophical/literary point. Here, when people are saying that Government has a monopoly on violence, they mean that the voters have granted them a legal right to do use force (which is at least pseudo-aggressive if not violent in all cases). The legitimacy can be contested in courts and debated upon in the next election - but till then, they reserve the monopoly.

> The legitimacy of an act (violence in this case) is highly subjective.

In the sense Weber uses it, it may be fuzzy, but its not subjective (its essentially the aggregate of how it is treated by the people in the territory.)

> The legitimacy of an act (violence in this case) is highly subjective.

The idea that legality is objective in a way legitimacy is not is debatable.

> I think I would rather say that the government has a legal monopoly on violence.

Perhaps, but that seems to be a trivial tautology, in that what is legal is precisely, by definition, what is formally allowed by some government.

> The legitimacy argument breaks down for oppressive governments where some revolting citizens take up violence because they see it as their last and only option.

Weber would state that, to the extent that this is a general failure over some subset of its territory, the entity has failed as the government of that territory -- that, in the case where no entity exercise a legal monopoly on violence over a territory, there is no government, and in the case where there is such an entity but its not the one that is claiming to be the government, then the claiming entity is simply wrong.

> Some might argue that their act is legitimate, but it is still illegal.

In the eyes of the purported government that they are revolting against, but not in the eyes of the purported government that they have formed in the revolution. Legality has no meaning without reference to a governing authority.

So, this is the actual substance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_the_legitimate_use_...

There is a lot more nuance there than the party-line recitation suggests.

I don't know why you're being downvoted.

I'm certainly not the government, and I can quite legitimately be violent when defending myself from illegitimate (aka non-governmental) violence.

For example, if someone breaks into my home and behaves threateningly, I can (rather violently) shoot them, and the government won't object in the slightest. So much for them having a monopoly.

Yeah but the world is not the USA. Some states DO have the monopoly of violence. E.g.: if you try to kill me in Spanish with a knife and I shoot you, I'll go to jail.

Since we're talking about Google and the American government here, I thought the context of the conversation was understood.

Sorry, I was editing and just addressing that :( It's a bad habit of mine. I moved the edit here.

Okay, I know that he specifically refers to the US (he mentioned Gitmo) but remember that even then the state is the one who lets you exercise violence. The monopoly's just lending some of its power to make you shut up and stop whining so he can keep minding his (evil) business.

Also: Windows had a monopoly even when Linux existed. Monopolies don't always have 100% of the market share, but they're still a monopoly de facto and will fight hard to achieve the full monopoly.

You can also be thusly legitimately violent in Texas if you pay a prostitute and don't get laid. It doesn't have to be illegitimate violence.

I knew we could defend ourselves against theft of property with violence in Texas, but I left that out because it's not all that common across the United States - we're a bit more liberal with our rights down here.

What's the deal with the prostitute? Breach of services (especially illegal services) doesn't justify violence. Did the prostitute grab the john's money and then try and run off? If that's what happened, I'm not too surprised by the result, since we're allowed to defend ourselves against theft.

> Google by comparison can turn off your gmail account.

I take it you've never lost an important email account, it can be very isolating. For some people that can be deadly.

I'm not saying that them fighting it isn't a good thing, but its hillarious that they're holding themselves out to be crusaders of freedom and privacy when they are one of the most prolific producers of "profile" data. You could even say they create "anti-privacy".

They are not fighting the mining by the government, only the secrecy. They are fighting for the right to tell you what is happening, just like they tell you what they are doing with your data.

The cynic in me thinks that Google is deliberately fighting a losing battle, so that later on they can say, "Hey, it's not our fault -- we want to tell you what is happening, they won't let us!"

I don't think the outcome of the battle matters at all in this case. Google is still putting up a fight. Their track record shows that they do at least tell us what is happening, so "it's not our fault, we want to tell you, they won't let us" is consistent with their actions, AFAIK.

> Google is still putting up a fight. Their track record shows that they do at least tell us what is happening

If they wanted to fight, they'd just publish the info instead of asking some court before doing anything.

Then again, it's doubtful whether anyone would believe them at this point if they published anything and claimed the information was complete.

Isn't that illegal?

Google doesn't tell us what they are doing with our data.

It's not your data once you've submitted it to a Google-run service. The expense of all the services Google provides without monetary compensation is the data they can collect. You trade that to them when you use the site: that's their fee.

Firstly I was responding to the parent who said that Google tells us what they do with our data. Whether you think of it as ours or theirs, they don't tell us what they do with it.

Secondly, if what you say is true, then we should stop complaining about what Google passes it to the government - what business is it of ours what they do with their data?

Thirdly, I doubt that anyone seriously believes that the 'fee' for using GMail is that their messages become Google's property.

It doesn't necessarily convert to their property from an intellectual property POV, but it is "Google's data" in the sense that you contractually allowed them to utilize it as described in the ToS and privacy policies, which one is free to reject or accept.

You know the old saying, "If you're not paying for a service, you're the product." Why expect anything else? Google is a for-profit company and it's an expensive thing to run. They deserve something for the services provided, don't they?

In other words it's nothing at all like a fee, as you described it earlier.

But, if things are as you say, Google can do whatever it likes with the data according to the ToS. If people don't like data about them being given to the Government, or used for any other undisclosed purpose, they shouldn't have used Google.

It sounds like a fee to me. That is the price that Google asks for admission to its services -- access to the data that you transfer whilst using Google services. Monetary fees are also contractually specified. I'm not sure why you think that just because the "fee" is non-monetary that you have to transfer all ownership rights in whole, instead of those defined as the price of entry in the contracts agreed to upon account registration.

When you pay a fee, you don't have any rights to limit what's done with the money after you've handed it over.

The cynic in me notes that the companies were spurred into action by the leak. Google has always showed some interest in providing transparency about government requests, but even they were not taking the US government to court over it.

The companies involved are taking these actions because the leak may have undermined consumer trust (eg. small drops in activity) in them. Perhaps even wrongly, if PRISM isn't as widespread as the initial leak suggested.

The difference is that they mine data in order to better target ads. When the Feds ask them to share the same data with them, it's for reasons that are vastly more disconcerting. Intent is everything, and that's twice as true when you're dealing with a lethal organization that shows every sign of having escaped from its legal restraints.

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