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FBI Turns To Private Sector for Data
MSNBC is running a nice piece about a private company that aggregates data about you and sells it to the government. Things like this are why I just don't understand the typical Libertarian babble that government data collection is bad, but corporations should be allowed to collect and sell whatever data they want. Hey, guess what: if a corporation can collect and sell your information, it's available to the government too. Ten billion records! That's more than 30 lines of data - each line could have dozens of pieces of information - about every man, woman and child in the United States. The mind boggles.
Um. When you say, "Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money", you're right; although I wouldn't really consider this either innocent or noble, but nonetheless, their goal is to make money. However, you then go on to say that they have our (our being consumers, etc.) interests in mind.
They don't. Not at all. Their goal is to make money. Period. Not to make products. Not to benefit the consumer. To get the consumer to give them as much money as they can, while doing as little as possible in return (because the more you do, the less profit you make). This is how business works today.
You can further see this by looking at all the silly patents and lawsuits that come up; these corporations have figured out that they don't even need to make anything to get money, they can just sue the pants off anyone who has an idea they've claimed. It's pretty sickening.
The information collected by corporations is simply to find where they can make the most money, not, as you assert, to "give us the products we want". If you were right, the RIAA would be donating music and money to napster for us all.
(This is not to say that some people in some corporations have more noble goals. It's just to say that this is not the corporate goal.)
Now the government is rather the opposite situation. Their goal is not to make money. It is to govern the people. Unfortunately, you have the opposite problem you had with corporations; the government as a whole might have a (somewhat) noble goal, but you get individuals and groups who struggle for more and more power.
Now claims of privatizing everything, without any thought as to the current state of the system, and what implications there would be for moving to a privatized system, and indeed what implications at all a privatized system would have, are just silly. (CA, power, deregulation.) Now, to put policing power in the hands of a corporation (whose goal is to do nothing but make money) just smacks of abuse.
You miss the point, as well. The government is owned by people, too. (Unless you think it is owned by aliens or something.) Just a lot more people. Each one of us. Corporations abuse us just as badly, just in different ways and for different goals.
"That is all we need to know" sounds like brainwashing or stubborn blindness to reality, too, if you ask me.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
I find this excerpt from the linked article to be interesting: Although ChoicePoint says it has records on nearly every American with a credit card, it doesn't always provide access to that data. The company's Autotrack service is popular with many agencies and businesses and is also used by reporters at The Wall Street Journal. But entering the name of FBI Director Louis Freeh into the Autotrack database produces an error message. A company spokesman says ChoicePoint intentionally blocks Mr. Freeh's records as an act of good corporate citizenship.
Translation of the last line: "A company spokesman says that the publicly held firm, ChoicePoint, is not so stupid as to endanger its stockholder's investments by providing information on the man heading one of ChoicePoint's biggest client organizations." Apparently this comment by the ChoicePoint drone is intended to make us all feel better, as if we all hobnob with politically heavyweights of Freeh's standing.