That is an extreme point of view that I don't agree with.
That's your prerogative, of course, but we're talking about the past now. It's not theoretical anymore. It has really happened, it is really happening.
I'd like to point out that theses abuses weren't done by the data holders but by the government...
You are drawing a sharp line between private enterprise and the government, but it seems like an increasingly irrelevant, imaginary distinction.
From a practical point of view, for the average user on the modern web, there never was such a distinction worth making, as it turns out. The "data holders" will rat you out to the government and the government will give orders to the "data holders" that they simply have to comply with. In many respects, the "data holders" may as well be another government office, from a privacy-minded point of view.
The victim here is not the government but the people it's supposed to serve. They are providing a bad service if data (likely ours but they don't say) gets stolen away.
1. You consider the government as a singular entity. It's a group of people. In that circumstance, it's as secure as the lowest denominator of person, which in a government is low.
2. You're find for them retaining your data, then implementing a law, then using it against you?
3. There are plenty of cases where the government have abused data that has been entrusted to them. There is no commercial motivation via competition for them to do a good job. You are effectively contracting out to a monopoly.
4. There is no absolute security either and it should be in your own hands. The moment you contract it out, you're morally responsible for the competence of who you contracted it out to, yet the government isn't an entity you can easily take to court nor seek compensation from.
5. Keys are complicated to distribute. Do you expect this to be 100% effective?
Consider these a little further then check your opinion against the facts on the table.
Actually it's the backdoor bit that's more problematic. If they hand data by court order that is acceptable but if the government has direct lines to servers that is much more problematic.
That's why the government is paying the companies to access the data. So it's much easier for companies to just comply with the order. The carrot and the stick.
It's not just government access; it's also the handing over of nearly every transaction to a private entity, whom can sell your transaction data to whomever they'd like at will.
This isn't all about government overstep. It's also about the giving up of your privacy to for-profit entities.
Regarding the gov:
In the US, citizens have protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. Forcing nearly all transactions into the view of the gov is an unreasonable search.
Your argument carries an assumption that all possible government action is hopelessly broken. I'm generally libertarian myself, but this viewpoint is ultimately a coping mechanism for a societal death spiral. Why bother working for results, when the results are always bad?
But even accepting the assumption that the government has become a malevolent attacker, then there is still an argument for goading it into hampering data collection - every bit of data collected by private companies is also available to the government to abuse and oppress us! Government power and corporate power are not in opposition, but rather two sides of the same coin of disempowering individuals.
What doesn't make sense is that people are afraid of USA government having much needed data, while private organizations have them already.
History teaches us that governments have to be treated according to different rules. Private companies didn't murder 100,000,000+ of their own customers in the last century alone. It took governments to do that.
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