Do you feel there's no difference between being surveilled by Oracle and being surveilled by the CCP? They're both terrible, but do you really think they're equivalent?

There's also the issue of the algorithm being used for propaganda, which (again) is also terrible in the hands of either party, but with potentially very different outcomes.

It's not the same, I see it more as two flavours of bad. However, the scary thing with private surveillance is that we do not know and won't know for a while the extent it is used.

Private surveillance however has the possibility to be much worse than government surveillance. We are already seeing collected data being used by the government to carry out enforcement (see period app subpoenas and the cameras that track where everyone drives), but the private actors have a perverse incentive to surveil as much as they can and make as much actionable data on it as possible. They can then show up at the governments door and offer it.

That is, private surveillance has the potential to surveil in ways governments don't even know they want, and they have an incentive to find any hole in the surveillance market and fill it.

Just reflecting more on this, can't you argue the whole cambridge analytica scandal was a case of private surveilance being used to affect an election through targeted propaganda? Same with brexit?

Sure, a political party is not a government, but surely capitalism-flavored mass surveilance has the same capabilities, and the buyers seem to have similar incentives to good 'ol government surveilance and propaganda.

The CCP has far less impact on my life as an American than the US government.