There’s a difference between government mandated surveillance (i.e. CCP / NSA) versus tech corp surveillance (i.e. Palantir), as one is “official” meaning it’s regulated at a federal level by a nation’s government enforced by police and the judiciary who have legal power to detain and charge while the other ("unofficial") is in the hands of a private company specialized in data collection but have no legal authority to detain people as Palantir isn’t the police.
The “official” level is enacted by federal governments or those in charge such as the president or prime minister (i.e. using “-16 social media ban” as a facade) by enforcing age verification (via facial scans and digital ID) on websites towards the average person (they use a VPN anyway for circumvention) or speaking about the NSA doing that covertly (Snowden put a light on it) and digital ID’s are regulated by a nation’s government.
The “unofficial” level is by a private tech giant who at their own discretion can harvest data of an individual, but they do not have legislative powers to detain that person since they are not law enforcement as mentioned. They can only spy on the subject but can’t intervene from a legal standpoint even if they sense or spot something criminal or they are covertly harvesting data from that person which is prone to being stolen by hackers.
Tech has been far worse, at least in my experience.
Until recently, government surveillance was at least predictable and consistent. Obviously I was against it, but seemed to have at least some voice and didn’t expect any personal harm. Of course with the recent sharp turn right, we can see how naive that is, how “the slippery slope” is not a fallacy
Meanwhile tech has formed entire businesses out of extracting and exploiting private information, including collecting it for the government to workaround due process, scaling out surveillance networks that government has no budget for, and generally going around limits desired by voters . They have actively pursued whatever avenue they can get away with, causing direct harm to us all
When the biggest abuses of privacy are committed by tech, but bought by government, which do you blame?