I guess you have an ideological bent that considers it a shuffling of deck chairs. At the end of the day, I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious.
But isn't this just like forcing these businesses to be a free-of-charge private cloud storage for the government? Oh, silly me, of course there's gonna be payola bigtime for providing a service like this.
If the government can query the whole trove whenever she deems there is a need, what difference does it make where the hard drives live?
Just more lacklustre theatre where nothing really changes and the partners/cronies get some extra loot.
> I would rather have private companies holding the records than government for reasons that should be obvious
They are certainly not obvious to me. With government, there is a democratic oversight, you can (at least in theory) vote to have these records destroyed or stop collecting them and so on.
However, when private company does it, what kind of control do you have over them? Especially if they are 3rd party.
Yeah I don't see why it's better to have private companies hold the data either. Private companies have a different set of incentives, such as mining that data for advertising...
In the theory from which that line originates, it is definitional rather than descriptive: under that theory, whatever has a monopoly on legitimate use of force in a territory is called the State, whether or not it is the thing that purports to be "the government" or not.
There's a bill of rights and a system of checks and balances that protects me from the government. None of those things exist with private companies, not even in theory.
