> Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because ...

... because the private sector tends to be far more competent and able to get shit done fast and effectively.

I really haven't found this to be true at all; corporations are just as dysfunctional or worse.

It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.

	▲	phatfish 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The dysfunction on the corporate side just gets swept under the rug, only in extreme cases does it get brought to the attention of the public. Governments have to operate in a more open manner (at least those with a reasonable amount of democratic accountability do). So the dysfunction is made public more often, and likely used over decades for political point-scoring. It's similar to open source development. Everyone moans that open source projects are full of infighting slowing down development compared to closed projects. Then, as soon as someone comes along and gets shit done like with systemd or the Linux kernel it's the opposite complaint. The doer is now a wannabe dictator ordering everyone about.

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windexh8er 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The private sector is only "more competent" at a certain size. Google, Microsoft, Meta - they're all largely inefficient and only effective as it pertains to the dollars they spend in lobbying. All of these companies are largely wasteful with respect to the money they spend on executives and initiatives that go against their own customers. They mirror the USG more and more year over year.

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mc32 2 hours ago | parent [-]

One big difference is that public companies restructure when things aren’t looking rosy. Government organizations don’t often reorganize and structurally they don’t have much flexibility.

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	▲	CPLX 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The government restructures endlessly what are you talking about. DHS was founded in 2002, TSA was founded in 2001. CFPB in 2010, Space Force in 2019. Even agencies that have been around “forever” aren’t that old. The EPA was founded in 1970, and OSHA was founded in 1971.

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rwmj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've worked at both disfunctional & functional large companies, a very disfunctional start up, and a very well run public sector research organization. The deciding factor in each case was the quality of management.

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QuadmasterXLII 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating from both sides.

	▲	sgarland 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If the market was critically examining fundamentals and thinking beyond the next quarter, I might agree with you. As it is, by and large it cares about the next earnings report. I work in fintech, at a market leader. We are wildly inefficient, but there is little interest in fixing it, because we’re making money hand over fist.

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baq 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Corporations are not disallowed to have a single master database. Government databases are at least in some cases firewalled off each other by law.

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arscan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Structurally it’s about incentives not competency.

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buellerbueller an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction.

The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.