There’s a difference between:
- The Federal Government spying on people & detaining dissidents
- Palantir conducting espionage & harvesting data from everybody
The first one is more by the government in which they have legislative power to enforce rules on the population (which is something Palantir does not possess) also giving power to both LE and the judiciary on detaining people. Usually, it’s a politician who creates these laws for their own gain. It’s already been done using AV under the excuse of “think of the children” when the truth is closer to deanonymizing the internet.
The second is done by a private company, like Palantir: they do not carry legal power on detaining people as they are not the police nor the justice system. The only thing they can do is harvest data from people and monitor them, but even if they witnessed something “illegal” they still can’t arrest or imprison people themselves (while both the government or NSA has that leverage as five eyes are already doing that).
Tech companies doing surveillance? Their goal is to make money.
Government doing surveillance? Their goal is to arrest/lock people up and stay in power.
Tech companies cannot get data from the government. Government CAN demand data from the tech company.
They are the same due to the company providing the information to the governments to take action.
Mussolini called fascism the marriage of corporations and government, so what’s the fucking difference?
It’s not like you can opt out of one or the other. Objectively it’s be better if broad scale data collection by private companies was illegal since then you’d have some confidence that only the govt was spying on you, and their budget for it would be smaller than Facebook and palantir’s.
It’s the same.
They’re all in bed with one another so all the same.
Tech company surveillance because they’ll sell the information to anybody who asks and pays for it, including government. This is how government circumvents right to privacy and illegal search and seizure. They don’t need a warrant if they have something the tech companies want.
Which is likely the government.
It depends on how much you trust or distrust that government or corporation. You might trust or distrust one government more than another or one corporation more than another. I can easily think of some governments and corporations I would trust more or less than other ones. Of course one shouldn’t completely trust or distrust any government or corporation. Choose which ones to trust carefully, hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.
In principle yes, because the government has the authority to legally punish people (with fines, imprisonment, even death), private companies do not…
But your specific example with Palantir is a bit weird because Palantir, as I understand it, is mainly in the business of data analysis for governments, so that is an example of government spying, not corporate spying…
