2019-08-29 at 4:20 AM UTC
aldra
JIDF Controlled Opposition
Which is more dangerous?
Is there a significant difference?
2019-08-29 at 4:21 AM UTC
aldra
JIDF Controlled Opposition
PS. I fully intend to write more about this, I'm curious if anyone else has considered it in depth though.
2019-08-29 at 4:27 AM UTC
Sudo
Black Hole
[my hereto riemannian peach]
obviously state. Private sector doesn't have the same levels of bureaucracy. Google may have everything you've ever done on a computer but they don't have enough people to sift through it all unless there's something really specific they care about. Big bludda can cross reference things and can have one hand talking to the other. Private sector doesn't have the same resources
2019-08-29 at 5:22 AM UTC
aldra
JIDF Controlled Opposition
*** will continue to write, posting incrementally in case I forget to save ***
I don't really think there's much difference anymore in the 'west' at least.
In regards to Google specifically, it's both directly and indirectly financed by multiple parts of the US government with code and data being shared with state intelligence agencies through mutually-linked groups like betabet.
There seems to be a concerted campaign to demonise direct state surveillance and propaganda; often simply stating that 'state institutions' are bad and 'private institutions' are good, a good example being Twitter's recent ban of advertising from selected companies that are partially state-funded. I'm aware that this is a component of the old capitalism vs. communism circlejerk dating back at least as far as the cold war, but the new component is that in many cases the state and 'private enterprises' act as one unit with two faces.
'Private Enterprises', specifically news and 'Big Tech' companies are afforded funding and competitive advantage in exchange for participating in state-backed initiatives ranging from aiding foreign policy to changing domestic opinions. Perhaps this is the wrong way to look at it though - in much of the 'Capitalist' west, finance is the source of both economic and political power so instead of thinking of the private sector as being partially subservient to state goals, it's more accurate to think of both the private sector and the state as being partially subservient to entrenched sources of 'wealth'.
My concern in making this thread is more about practical application though; it matters little whether the person who is surveilling you chooses to identify as a state or private actor. What I find to be interesting is the way in which such groups exploit existing law and social perception by using private companies to collect surveillance data, only to be directly connected to the state apparatus that processes and acts on it.
In much of the world where capitalism is viewed overall favourably, there is the perception that private sector spying and surveillance is largely harmless. Their goals, it is believed, are purely economic and their hoarding of personal information is only a matter of improving the company's economic success. There's no reason to believe a company would, for example, keep a database of political dissidents because it does nothing to improve their 'bottom line'. The unasked question then becomes, "but what if someone would want to buy such a database?".
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2019-08-29 at 6:10 AM UTC
I agree that it doesn't really matter who does the surveillance, although I think there is a significant difference between private sector data-mining and state surveillance in that privately held data is a court order (or less) away from being available to the state, while the opposite isn't true. As much as I'm sure they'd love to, Amazon generally can't pull your criminal record to try to sell ski masks and leather gloves to convicted burglars.
In some sense state surveillance encompasses corporate surveillance, what Amazon and Google know Big Brother also knows. But generally Amazon and Google aren't going to be exchanging your data with each other, or at least not without paying for it.
The point that power in both the public and private sectors generally flows from the same sources is a good one, I'm sure that Rupert Murdoch could get his hands on your files with the spy agencies if he really wanted to, but at least as of yet it's not really economically sensible for a profit-seeking corporate entity to do so at any kind of scale. But then this doesn't really make corporate data-gathering benign since that data is still trivially accessible to the actors who are more likely to send a death squad to your door.
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2019-08-29 at 7:53 AM UTC
it doesnt matter because in a capital-feudalist state, big capitals are the governmemt, state, and employer all rolled into one.
for datas that the governmemt couldnt legally get they can covertly do so, and for jobs that the government / state couldnt do itself it can always subcontract them out to their subcontractors' subcontractors' subcontractors.
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2019-08-29 at 7:55 AM UTC
Originally posted by Lanny
ski masks and leather gloves to convicted burglars.
people who viewed these also viewed :
20" bolt cutters. 3' prybars.
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2019-08-29 at 9:27 AM UTC
Narc
Naturally Camouflaged
[connect my yokel-like scolytidae]
look, its the industrial elite that really run this world, they pretty much are the state in so much as they have the state in their pockets and control everything they do. so no, there really isn't much difference between state and private sector surveillance. all these things like court orders, warrants and data protection acts are just smoke screens in place to keep up the illusion that democratic governments work the way they're made out to do.
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2019-08-29 at 4:06 PM UTC
They are both highly dangerous but state surveillance is worse. However in the future I think private surveillance will whirl out of control and affect people in ways we can't even foresee.
With state surveillance, you can't opt out. There's no turning it off. But with private surveillance, your data's being sold to some company in China.
2019-08-29 at 4:13 PM UTC
-SpectraL
coward
[the spuriously bluish-lilac bushman]
It's all the same entity.
2019-08-30 at 1:20 AM UTC
i dont really care , its becoming so massive that none of it matters unless you are really engaging in high stakes crime. other than sensitive data that is, thats pretty important for people not to get, but you cant really not pay online in these days.
