The ads companies hate the government too. They don’t want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There’s no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)
I think “surveillance” doesnt cut it. Mass monitoring of political opinions, and subtle manipulation of these political opinions through recomendation algorithms in social media is whats being attempted here. “Surveillance” sounds so innocent in comparison.
But youre right, the advertisement business model is a front, a capitalist-flavoured mask, to make a state apparatus appear natural and somewhat acceptable to the people.
Okay nerd, modern advertising. Targeted advertising. Whatever you want to call it. The ad industry works on ways to learn everything about you and then contracts with the government to sell access to this data (or they are compelled, but often the former via data brokers). Snowden revealed this with prism and a number of other programs but it predated that and has been going on since
It’s because advertising is the pretext for government surveillance
The ads companies hate the government too. They don’t want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There’s no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)
I think “surveillance” doesnt cut it. Mass monitoring of political opinions, and subtle manipulation of these political opinions through recomendation algorithms in social media is whats being attempted here. “Surveillance” sounds so innocent in comparison.
But youre right, the advertisement business model is a front, a capitalist-flavoured mask, to make a state apparatus appear natural and somewhat acceptable to the people.
that’s right, those lucky strike ads in 50s mags? Government surveilance.
Okay nerd, modern advertising. Targeted advertising. Whatever you want to call it. The ad industry works on ways to learn everything about you and then contracts with the government to sell access to this data (or they are compelled, but often the former via data brokers). Snowden revealed this with prism and a number of other programs but it predated that and has been going on since