>A private company can't decide to lock somebody away in prison or send them to death row.

A private company can 100% do this in many ways. They already do this buy putting up and using their technology in minority areas, for example.

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unethical_ban 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a distinction. Private companies are partnering with the government to take away personal liberty.

We should ban the government from accessing data gathered by private companies by default, perhaps. I need to mull on it.

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bjt 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The point is that "who gathers it" should be irrelevant.

The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves.

On the other hand if a company is just aggregating something benign like weather data, there's no need to bar the government from buying that instead of building it themselves.

	▲	dimitrios1 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The government shouldn't be able to buy data that would be unconstitutional or unlawful for them to gather themselves. Now that sounds like a good argument to make in court! How do we do it?

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asveikau 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I also personally think there are some private collections we should ban, or put in place limitations on how it can be used, in the interest of general privacy.

That is trickier to decide on and surely there's room to debate.