> Now the megacorps are trying to defend our personal liberty and privacy from governments that have gotten too powerful (albeit mostly because it would improve sales)! That's... unexpected.
Don't be too quick about it. Once the megacorps win the war, it's interesting to see who will defend our personal liberty and privacy from them.
Indeed. In the UK, we're wrestling with a rightwing _news_ junta with its own surveillace abuses, intertwined with the police.
The power to dig up every detail about someone's life then publish it for the adverse judgement of millions of people is capable of great destructiveness if abused.
In the UK, we're wrestling with a rightwing _news_ junta with its own surveillace abuses, intertwined with the police.
While that may be true, it's not really the same situation.
For one thing, it seems clear that the behaviour in question was illegal, and people are going to jail for it.
For another, guessing that someone won't have changed the default PIN to access their voicemail is not on the same technical level as, say, building backdoors into widely used hardware by being sneaky with state-of-the-art mathematics.
Fortunately, the mega corps haven't started hiring their own police forces and locking people up who break whatever rules they decide are appropriate. If they did that, then I might reconsider what data I shared with them.
The state is in a very different (privileged) position to commercial companies and we need an additional layer of protection from the state that is not necessary with companies.
> The state is in a very different (privileged) position to commercial companies and we need an additional layer of protection from the state that is not necessary with companies.
I'm definitely not disputing that. I also believe that the current state of affairs isn't OK.
What I am disputing is the notion that companies are somehow defending our privacy rights. No they're not. Microsoft, Google and Facebook not only do not battle for consumer rights, their entire damn businesses are based on eroding them as much as possible. If they could have legally collected the data NSA was collecting, they'd have done so without as much as batting an eye.
All they're doing in this context is trying to shift public outcry from their own dubious practices, for two reasons:
1. As people start sharing less and less personal data for fear of government surveillance, they're also sharing less and less personal data with the tech companies themselves. This means less personal data to sell and, consequently, less profits.
2. Average consumers typically don't notice how much of their data is in fact shared with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The NSA scandal put this into a new perspective: they share enough data that even the government cares. The PR folks aren't stupid; they are predictably trying to shift public outcry towards the NSA, attempting to create the image that somehow these companies -- which otherwise deeply care for their users' privacy -- have done the best they could to protect the private data of their customers, and now need support to battle against this Bigger Enemy. Conveniently, the fact that they can still tap unlimited information for their own use is shielded away.
I'm not denying surveillance laws need to be changed, I'm simply denying the benevolent role of large corporations.
Don't be too quick about it. Once the megacorps win the war, it's interesting to see who will defend our personal liberty and privacy from them.