This framing is a cheap rhetorical trick. Restated this leads to the statement “all companies by default are in the business of capturing customer data, all other claims about their product and smoke screens to hide that.”

Which is something you can believe but it falls into the extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence category. But by claiming it about Oracle or Israeli cyber firms or whatever you swap the evidence burden to the person who has the not extraordinary claim, that most businesses are doing what it claims on the tin.

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coliveira a day ago | parent | next [-]

It's not just a rhetorical trick. Amazon collects most of their data in Virginia, right at the doorsteps of a well known "intelligence" org in the USA. These companies that handle data all around the world are authorized to exist for some reason...

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kasey_junk a day ago | parent [-]

Then the argument should be that. Not “hey commenter you must prove a never ending set of ‘now do Oracle’, ‘now do Amazon’”.

Say the words “I believe all companies exist as an extension of the US intelligence apparatus” and claim the burden for yourself.

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cluckindan a day ago | parent [-]

That is a strawman argument.

Oracle gets its name from a codename of a 1977 project for the Central Intelligence Agency, Oracle's first customer.

In 2004, then-United States Attorney General John Ashcroft sued Oracle Corporation to prevent it from acquiring a multibillion-dollar intelligence contract. After Ashcroft's resignation from government, he founded a lobbying firm, The Ashcroft Group, which Oracle hired in 2005. With the group's help, Oracle went on to acquire the contract.

Following the beginning of the Gaza war in 2023, Oracle’s top executives, including Safra Catz and Larry Ellison, publicly aligned the company with Israel’s military operations. They issued statements of solidarity, paid double salaries to Israeli employees, and donated to organizations connected to Israel’s wartime response.

	▲	kasey_junk a day ago \| parent [-]
		See. Thats a good comment. “Your use of Oracle is a bad counter factual because…” Switching to that is commenting in good faith. It educates and argues the point and makes it clear that you aren’t in fact claiming that all companies are surveillance state apparatus. Note that other commenters ran with the “but they are actually argument” because the door was opened.

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chiefalchemist a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Books such as:

“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”

and

“Stand Out of Our Light”

might not change your mind, but you’re likely to end up realizing customer data hovering is more of a driver of modern business decisions than you realize. To say nothing of the assets such activities provide the intelligence communities.

This is happening. Please don’t dismiss it as conspiracy theory.