The ads companies hate the government too. They don’t want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There’s no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)
The ads companies hate the government too. They don’t want to share their precious data with the government. The government might just turn around and hand it to someone like Palantir. The companies would much prefer to sell it to Palantir.
There’s no cozy relationship between the tech companies and the government. The tech companies just want to make money. If the government were buying the data, they might be willing to do it. But, they really hate that governments try to subpoena the data and get it for free.
This was maybe the case back during the Snowden era where the government pushed for compliance and backdoors (like the leaked prism program). That’s the real driving force behind things like e2ee and “privacy forward” steps in the interim that are ultimately just theater. Now if they use XKeyscore to spy on the actual infrastructure of the web it’s not as helpful - WhatsApp, iMessage, etc are all encrypted in transit. But most of these things are not encrypted in a way that prevents the companies from running analytics, selling those analytics to data brokers, who then share with palantir and the NSA (remember Cambridge analytica? Shit like that is an insulating layer so apple, google, and Facebook can now sell your data to the government without directly doing so)