I trust people who do things for money a hell of a lot more than those who do things for power. The Apple vs. NSA et.Al. tradeoff is no-contest for me.
That's interesting. Would you care to elaborate?
What I'd figured is this: The Big Data firm has a financial interest in gathering all my data and utilizing it in some form or another. Every employee shares that interest, as quotas and efficiency bonuses goad them on.
A secret service or law enforcement organization, on the other hand, consists of people who're underpaid and overworked, and who couldn't be happier if they don't have to sift through my smut folder. Provided it even comes to that, that is: If Edward Snowden is to be believed, most data gathering done nowadays is heavily automatized, and only in case of doubt are the results forwarded to human analysts.
Which seems understandable enough since even intelligence agencies such as Stasi or Securitate – whose grip on society made the NSA look like a charitable organization run by amateurs – failed in their bid for total surveillance. Even in an analogue society and even with a third of the population on their payrolls, those organizations just couldn't process the flood of information coming their way.
I don't think the NSA does things for "power", by the way – at least when it comes to ordinary folks like you and me. If they don't find anything to implicate us in illicit activities or suggest we possess valuable information, we become useless to them. As a matter of fact, it seems as though everything collected on non-persons of interest is deleted rather quickly, just to save memory space.
Last but not least, there's the morality of it (or lack thereof). The Zuckerbergs of the world make billions of playing gullible fools like string puppets, appealing to their base instincts. Secret services, on the other hand, don't make a dime of my personal information and they do not approach me under a guise of altruism to gain access to them.
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