There is a huge difference between government mass surveillance and commercial privacy infringements.
The government can use force to make you behave the way politicians and bureaucrats want you to behave. The government can limit your freedom and it tends to curtail your civil rights. In a state with total control, democracy will succumb. Living in a Big Brother society will be unbearable. Government mass surveillance is about control and power.
Commercial players tend to use the data they collect to try to sell you stuff – which basically is about influencing a voluntary relation. Or to evaluate partners (customers, suppliers etc.) that they conduct business with. Never the less, this can be very annoying, intrusive, damaging and even dangerous for the private individual.
We must keep in mind that these are two different issues. They are about totally different relations to the individual. They should be approached in different ways.
Sometimes I get the impression that certain parties in the public debate deliberately is trying to muddle the water. Politicians regularly try to lead the discussion away from government mass surveillance to issues concerning commercial actors. And when asked what they do to protect people’s right to privacy their answers often are about Facebook, Google, advertising and commercial data mining – when it ought to be about mass surveillance, data retention and the relations between citizens and the state.
They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that.
/ HAX
You are partially wrong. Commercial players’ main purpose with everything they do is to make money. They indeed use the data they collect to advertize and try to make the user buy goods and services.
BUT, they will not think twice before doing so by changing what the user sees in a flow of news, that the user assumes is unbiased, by changing who it recommends the user to become friends with, et cetera.
They will not think twice before downplaying questions of privacy in the flows of information they control, because tracking users brings them money.
They will not think twice before skewing what information users get about the candidates or parties in elections, and especially how that information is presented, to get more votes for the one(s) that gives them better opportunities to act in ways that brings them money.
And they are allowed to do this, agreed to by the users, implicitly from the Terms of Service that most users don’t even read.
So don’t say that one is more dangerous than the other. They must both be stopped, or democracy is dead.