We need PII to be so toxic that companies run screaming from the liability unless they have explicit consent[1] and a legit reason to house it.

A company selling me widgets wouldn't store or let another company store extra information about me if it subjected them the widget seller to HIPAA. Or better yet, something more stringent.

We don't need the government to be antagonistic toward corporations; we just need a government that makes the corporations internalize the risk they're making us take.

[1] The fact that ToS are enforceable when every court in the country knows that only a vanishly small percentage of people ever read them, much less understand them, means that they're not doing their job.

> we need a government that is antagonistic towards corporations that are abusing us

Please don't. The entire civilized world for all of history and before has been built on the uncomfortable alliance between power/capability and governance/legitimacy. Protection-seeking is the primary support system for tyranny which is happy to induce the chaos they protect you from.

We just need enough negative feedback for any kind of abuse that it stops, because regulations have to be slow to be accurate and thus invite abuse innovation. The main part of that negative feedback is effective competition so people can vote with their feet.

So, ask not for antagonism but for real alternatives.

That would be child abuse, as corporations are born out of the state as statutory entities. Corporations used to be chartered to do specific jobs like build a bridge or whatever. Charter max was 20 years. This is why the first and second national banks ran for only 20 years each.

I would be fine with the NSA[1] recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup.

I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. Like, it is only after I have been arrested that the data is accessible to the court in which I will have been presented to face accusations of a crime.

I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.

This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.

And there's the corporations who - for some reason - are given a pass. If governments can steal your data, so can Mr. FatCat and his team of merry department heads.

What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.

I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life, for review. This kind of super-wide view of things would be quite enlightening, I'm pretty sure.

[1] - just for the record, I think the problems that the NSA are trying to solve are obsolete; that there are far greater solutions to fallacies which support the utility of it as an organ of government; I am in the camp that this is a massive human rights issue, also.

but you don't have separation of church and state... thats a poor comparison. religious dogma eats into nearly all public discourse.

I would be fine with the NSA recording everything I do, if I had access to it as a backup. I think it would be a valuable service a government could perform for me - assuming there were a way to make sure the data was not accessed without my side of the key. I would also think it pretty neat, were I able to use it as a backup over my life, for my own purposes - if I could do it without involving the spooks. Like, let me use the technological spy infrastructure, and if I happen to commit a crime, well then - come on in, inspect my data by all means.

This, I think, is the only circumstance where it is justifiable - but of course, it is not reality. We have absolutely no agency over the activities of Pine Gap, etc.

However, corporations - for some reason - are given a pass.

What the world really needs, is for hackers to get user-facing operating systems which just really do, backup everything. It's okay, you can choose not to use it.

I'd love to have every single phone call I've ever made available, at this point in my life.

I wish that I could upvote this twice.

I was watching a documentary about the first food regulations in the US today, lobbyists are as old as the state here, good luck getting them out, the entire system was designed by and for them