I think it’s unclear whether state surveillance is always worse. It can be, but it doesn’t need to be. Surveillance that’s used for public safety is a very different animal than that for political ends. The first order effect of such a system would be the fast and accurate resolution of crimes. The second order effect is the absolute disempowerment of criminals: you can leave your bike unlocked because no one will try to steal it. What the US has now is pervasive but not very effective: mostly downside and little upside. Far too many crimes go unpunished in the US.
We haven’t reached the pinnacle of surveillance capitalism yet either. Very soon every customer will be profiled instantly as they enter the store based on facial recognition systems. Treating people differently based on protected characteristics is illegal, but remembering that they were kicked out of a club in LA to deny them services or jobs in NYC a decade later is not. These blacklist systems can be used to deny basic services even if you’re not in prison, have no transparency, and no accountability. And unlike government there is little recourse. You can’t vote on the decisions of Mastercard or Chase.
I definitely think these conversations can be hard and I thank you for bringing your opinion. I think discussion is needed without fighting :) FWIW I think you make good points and it is part of why I find it hard to put a definitive answer at which is worse. Do we agree that both are bad? I believe I understand your argument but there's two points I want to make in response. First about the nature of trust and second about abuse potential.
1. Nature of Trust: I think depending on how much you trust your government that views on state surveillance are going to change and similarly how you trust corporations. We should definitely acknowledge this because it plays a major factor. I believe your stance is from that of trust for government but distrust of corporations. Personally I distrust both (American). The two slight advantages I see to surveillance capitalism are that the collected data is distributed and that it is easier to poison the well. In the competitive corporate setting they _tend_ to not sell the data but rather access to the tools to process the data. (To be clear, both forms exist) If the data could be bought then it gives their competition advantages. So there's a weird incentive to keep that data locked tight (think Google & Facebook as opposed to Equifax). The hope is that no single entity can collect enough information. As for poisoning the well, I'd assume that this would almost always be illegal for a state surveillance program but difficult to sue in a corporate setting. I believe that it is also easier to fine or punish a single actor in the state case -- especially since they need to set examples -- while a corporate case they will likely not pursue as this is expensive unless you create and distribute tools. But maybe that's a bad assumption.
2. Abuse potential: This is the argument that I think privacy maximizers focus on and do not budge or even recognize the usefulness of surveillance (you got to understand if you want to prevent it). Personally I see democracies as perpetual balancing acts and naturally unstable. But that the benefits outweigh the costs. The issue, often called 'Turnkey Tyranny", is that a single bad actor can be democratically elected and then abuse that power (we've heard this, I'll move on in a sec). We don't have to point to Hitler, but we can even point to the abuse that the parent discussed with respect to the Patriot Act which we saw used and arguably abused under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. Surveillance creep seems more pervasive within a government system, to me, as what I've seen is that once something is in place it is hard to remove. On the other hand, in a corporate setting you can move a lot faster. For example, Apple and WhatsApp/Facebook are both on privacy kicks, promoting their encryption. We all know that there's still collection, but the positioning themselves as privacy preserving has kicked off a competition in the other direction while we haven't seen such a movement in the US government (personally I wouldn't say GDPR is strong and that the EU articles are easily circumvented). That's a clear double edged sword but does feel like it can respond to user sentiment faster (one of the big differences in capitalism vs communism is market response and I see corollaries here). On the other hand I've continuously seen my government try to remove encryption and even attempt to hid it under the guise of universally hated things (child porn and terrorism). Essentially I see laws/regulations as more sticky than corporate decisions. Combine that with the above hope for distribution, I think there is less potential for abuse. The final factor we need to include is that a state can do more harm to a citizen than a corporate entity can.
For your specific cases about a bike being stolen or the common one about the feeling of safety walking down the street, especially at night, I think there are other correlating factors that we can't ignore. While we see examples of bikes being returned and bad guys quickly caught I'm not convinced these are statistically higher or primarily dependent on the surveillance itself. Perception obviously plays a role: perception of risk to commit crime as well as perception of likelihood of victimization. One of the most interesting statistics I see (I probably spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about these numbers lol) is that Americans perceive crime as increasing year over year while there is a dramatic trend downwards[0,1,2,3]. Though I'll be honest in that [0] notes that less than half of crimes are reporter of solved, but the lowest rates are with sexual violence and we have been seeing a steady increase in reporting (likely related to MeToo and other such movements). But I also am having trouble finding estimates of under-reporting for other countries so this might be related to my original comment about America's failures being more in the open or possibly bad googling. I can at least state that from personal experience I have little fear in leaving my door unlocked and often friends comment at how crazy and careless I am but despite having lived in areas with perceived high crime rates (I look them up) I have yet to have had anything taken from my household. I will say that bike theft is common in my area, but the homeless rate is high and that's an easy to pawn item and probably a better indicator of a different problem (a confounding variable) than actual safety (which I'm mostly thinking is violent crime).
Sorry for the wall. I hope I didn't repeat too much that is argued to oblivion.
I’ve noticed now that I’ve replied to a few of your comments in the past and while we don’t always agree I hope you understand that I always come from a position of curiosity and humility.
I’ve lived in the US for a good amount of time, and have lived in Singapore and China for extended periods. My perception of both Singapore and China are that they are extremely safe. On top of that, the government of Singapore is functional and accessible in ways Americans are unfamiliar with (leading to further distrust of government). Singapore also has a reputation for being extremely non-corrupt. Both the US and China have a good deal of corruption but of different kinds. There was a great Freakonomics episode on this.
With respect to trusting government vs corporate power, we can only trust corporations to do one thing: maximize profit. Their interests only happen to align with ours to a first order approximation.
I thought I recognized your name! I hope I come across that way too but also ask for forgiveness when I fumble lol. I don't ever see disagreement as a bad thing (in fact, often welcome it), but like everyone I have some buttons (I more get upset when people tell me things I'm more well versed in and I don't think we've had any of those issues). I can say that I've enjoyed this conversation, thanks.
I definitely agree with the sentiment around what we can trust corporations to do. I feel that my main issue is that we can't trust governments to do anything. So that at least decreases entropy? The multi-agent part seems to help too, but this is also a simple model. Maybe my views would be different if I had similar lived experiences. I did enjoy that Freakanomics episode.
Mostly my belief is that things are complicated and people tend to oversimplify and that oversimplification leads to obscurification, which leads to substantial power imbalances. Which I a part I differ from many is that this can be done without directed action and that players that benefit don't need to actively collude (aka: no conspiracies required).
We haven’t reached the pinnacle of surveillance capitalism yet either. Very soon every customer will be profiled instantly as they enter the store based on facial recognition systems. Treating people differently based on protected characteristics is illegal, but remembering that they were kicked out of a club in LA to deny them services or jobs in NYC a decade later is not. These blacklist systems can be used to deny basic services even if you’re not in prison, have no transparency, and no accountability. And unlike government there is little recourse. You can’t vote on the decisions of Mastercard or Chase.