What Corporate and Government Surveillance Entail

Module 5
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Module 5
Surveillance used to be complex and unaffordable. People only used it when it was essential. For instance, they could do surveillance when law officials wanted to tail suspicions or a business needed comprehensive purchasing history for billing needs. However, there were exclusions, and these cases were difficult and expensive. With time, the surveillance process continued to be simplified and cheap. Recently, corporate surveillance has grown from gathering as little data as possible. Today, corporations tend to gather data concerning their clients, although they only collected a little information about clients' transactions they have to bill in the past. As a result, it has become cheaper and easier for individuals to communicate, publish their viewpoints, and access data. This paper analyzes what corporate and government surveillance entail, including their similarities and differences, which is more pernicious, if there is a need to be concerned with one over the other, and if we should maintain a distinction between the two surveillance. The paper further analyzes whether the exchange for data ownership and privacy for services is fair, surveillance's harm on society, and the opinion of whether to allow the exchanges to remain.
In terms of online privacy, government and corporate surveillance act similarly. Both surveillances track the credit card purchases of a person. They obtain emails to gather information concerning you. Furthermore, they may even control the movement of a person in the real world. If state surveillance had the impact of turning the people into subjects to gain state power, then corporate surveillance turns consumers into a product that corporations sell to other companies, advertisers, and data brokers (Current Affairs, n.d). Government and corporate surveillance, however, have differences in some ways. For instance, corporates are usually interested in making money from individuals, while governments are interested in preventing attacks that could disrupt commercial activities. The government also can imprison or kill a person, while a company does not have that right. A person's inability to refuse the government is a major issue differentiating the National Security Agency (NSA) from the prying corporates worldwide. Therefore, people should care about state surveillance for similar reasons as they should care about the attempt to address other undesired things since they are also bad and addressable.
Corporate surveillance is more pernicious than public surveillance; thus, we should be more worried about it. Usually, private organizations, unlike government or state surveillance, they not massively incentivized to monitor individuals' behavior. However, it focuses on changing behavior (Current Affairs, n.d). On the other hand, the government, to a certain degree, tries to influence people's behavior. However, in the West part, this capacity pales compared to the power of firms such as Facebook and Google. Furthermore, great evidence shows this model is disadvantageous to overall human wellness and human right and tends to infringe on freedom of privacy (Current Affairs, n.d)....