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Comment by treyd | Hacker News Reader

Because Americans are so terrified of government that they can be completely okay with something terrible as long as it's private corporations doing it (and so, theoretically, you have the ability to not be a customer of that corporation) and not the government. Even if in practice your data is still being collected by that corporation indirectly or all of their competitors are also collecting and selling your data.

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>Because Americans are so terrified of government that they can be completely okay with something terrible as long as it's private corporations doing it

That's not it. I think it is perfectly reasonable to set up a government with constraints and a culture of respect for the citizenry. It isn't about trust or no trust in 'government', because government is made up of individuals, and individuals have all kinds of motivations. I generally trust the government, but I am aware that any specific policy or decision can be a corrupt action for the benefit of some individual within the beurocracy.

Private corporations in America regularly go bankrupt, lose tons of money, go out of business, go defunct, etc. The government does not. It's just not the same thing at all. Private corporations can be dissolved by government action. They can be handled much easier than the government.

When was the last time a large and entrenched corporation did something terrible to the American public and was forcibly dissolved by the government?

Not forcibly dissolved, but as we've seen with COVID and the recent 'woke' stuff, the public collectively punishes corporations they don't like. Even facebook is seeing a mass exodus from the platform after the election fiasco in 2016 and the ensuing controversy (which was around data privacy).

Oh am I?

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