Privacy notes from all over

A government’s first job is to protect its citizens, but it should do that job with the public's informed consent, not demand blind trust; we should thank Edward Snowden for making public the awesome extent of the NSA's surveillance of our electronic communications, because now we can have a proper debate about whether we think a ramped-up level of surveillance is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks. But if we decide that we're not willing to trade some of our privacy for security, what do we do about Google and its cohort? If we decide it isn't okay for the government to invade our privacy to make us safe, why would we continue to permit Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, et al to build digital dossiers on us just to sell us stuff?