• catloaf@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      51
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 day ago

      It would be worse. They would use that access to target people.

        • tempest@lemmy.ca
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          9
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 day ago

          I mean they were built to make money, the fact that you can send them a national security letter is just a happy accident that keeps the NSA from having to run more datacenters.

          • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            22 hours ago

            I respectfully disagree. They were built for power and control. Monestisation just paid for it and helped adoption.

            • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              edit-2
              19 hours ago

              I think you’ve got it backwards. Like the other person said, this shit was built to make money, the power and control came later. Said power and control also came partially from the money, since money is just power coupons, and they used that to buy up competitors and regulators alike to get to the state their in now.

              Not everything is built with evil intentions. Quite frequently, evil corrupts otherwise benign institutions as they gain power to serve the ends of those already in power.

              • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                2 hours ago

                The encryption battles of the early 1990s focused primarily on two issues: restrictions on the export of encryption technologies and the National Security Agency’s (NSA) attempts to introduce a chipset called the Clipper chip to network technology. The first was the result of Cold War era laws designed to control the diffusion of sensitive technologies, including encryption software. This became an issue in the early 1990s when encryption software became commonplace in web browsers. In 1996, President Clinton signed an executive order that loosened restrictions after technology companies claimed that the export controls on encrypted products hurt their sales.

                The National Security Agency (NSA) announced the Clipper chip in 1993. The chip was a piece of hardware designed for phones which would provide encryption on communications while also producing an encryption key and making it available to the NSA. After backlash from civil liberty groups, findings of technical vulnerabilities in the chip, and low adoption rates despite incentives, the program ended in 1996.

                https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-brief-history-of-u-s-encryption-policy/

          • StinkyFingerItchyBum@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            22 hours ago

            Dead people also have no claim on the present or future. You can own more, even when the pie is shrinking if you negate others claims.

      • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        19 hours ago

        they already are.

        its been a while since snowden leaked that to us.

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        7
        ·
        1 day ago

        My dear child… They are already doing this. Us and Israeli spooks already infiltrated all mega corps. Mega corps know and collaborate.

        All of them are balls deep helping waffen IDF do a genocide…

        They help ice gestapo to target people within the US…

        These examples are merely what has been publicly documented.

    • Beej Jorgensen@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 day ago

      Yes, it’s a lot worse. The particular difference is that one of these organizations has the power to disappear you without consequence.

    • vivendi@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      21 hours ago

      I know people like to hate on google, but google is actually like 3 companies in a trench coat.

      They do highly valuable open source / open ecosystem work (I will say the chance of you indirectly using a google tool without knowing is over 90% now) and if the American government, a capitalist fascist government no less, gets their hands on it, we’re fucked

      Not all of google is adsense or YouTube.