It's easier to not buy an iPhone than it was trying to prevent a politician I didn't trust from getting in office.

In either case, collective action is, at best, the best you're going to have.

Do regulations not have meaning?

You might think you're safe because you don't carry a phone, never upload a photo, etc. You drove across the country in a car you paid cash for while bemoaning cameras that catch you speeding, in the name of "privacy". Meanwhile meta knows exactly where you are as their face recognition attached it to your shadow profile when someone took a selfie with you in the background, you were seen on a ring doorbell by amazon as you walked down the street

This "individualism" and "I'm alright jack" approach is a fallacy the world can't afford.

My government doesn't have a copy of my family tree or a good idea what my DNA is. Ancestry.com does.

> My government doesn't have a copy of my family tree

They absolutely do, your parents were on your government issued birth certificate, and the government issues marriage certificates and official name change paperwork too. I'd be a bit surprised if they don't some idea of your DNA as well, though I'd agree not to the level of Ancestry.

They all do though. Do you think the government isn't tapping the genetic databases of 23andme and Ancestry? Or the bottomless data out that is Gmail. Or iCloud. Or Gmaps location data.

I'd rather not decide who is the worse privacy offender, companies or governments, and best restrict both to a need-to-know basis.

They wouldn't be able to tap those databases if those private companies didn't make them in the first place.

Until the gag order comes in to set those databases up. We need to hold both entities, private corporations and governments, accountable.

No you can’t.

If you live in California, with a population of 39.43 million, you get the same representation in the Senate as Wyoming with a population of 538,486 residents. Not to mention gerrymandering, the electoral college, etc. Your vote even as part of a collective doesn’t represent the will of the people.

We are seeing right now with President Musk that the President can complete ignore the constitution and the laws with “qualified immunity”. Is what we ste seeing now “accountability”?

Citizens aren't represented in the Senate. Citizens are represented in the House of Representatives. That's why California has 52 representatives and Wyoming has 1. The Senate represents the state itself, which is why each state has 2 senators. This misunderstanding of the difference between the House and the Senate needs to end.

Indeed, California has 52 times the representation but about 80 times the people. That disconnect is why the cap on the size of the House needs to be lifted.

Who confirms judges and heads of various departments? The House is powerless compared to the Senate.

Without the Senate, the United States of America would have taken a lot longer to congeal than it did. If it ever did.

The popular election of senators fundamentally changed a lot about how American government works - senators elected by state legislators (which was the usual method prior to that) are beholden to a very different pressure group with very different interests than the populace at large.

Now, they did go about the change properly. So points there. But at the time of the amendment, nobody really anticipated the Farm Bill (or, for that matter, Herbert Hoover getting into the positions of power he held prior to his election to the Presidency - where his performance was sufficiently strong to get him elected to the top job).

> I can hold my government accountable via the polling booth

Yes, but elected officials have used private information to disenfranchise groups of people before. Europe's right to privacy is in part a reaction to abuses that occurred in Nazi Germany.

Private information gathered, processed and stored by private companies

There are large numbers of laws about the data that my government can gather, hold and use on me. No they aren't perfect.

There are pretty much zero laws about what Elon or Zuck can gather, hold, and use

I'm far more worried about the second set of data