Snowden's "Permanent Record" is an interesting read, but at the end he seemed to view a transition from the government collecting and storing data on individuals to the private sector collecting and holding that data as some kind of positive event. It's really not any different, and neither entity is 100% secure against data theft and exposure.
Corporations and governments have an obsession with tracking individuals, although probably for different reasons (profits and tax collection being the main goals, I imagine, with 'social credit score' as a newer more dystopian concept). This is well-documented in the US and no doubt applies to NZ as well:
> "As we have documented at The Privacy Issue, pacts with U.S. intelligence are a mix of cooperation with, and infiltration by, three-letter agencies. Though nearly every major Big Tech company has cooperated with the NSA's surveillance programs in some way, the Google cloud was notably backdoored via clandestine means that were likely unknown to the company, with NSA agents gleefully bragging about the infiltration in an internal presentation."
https://theprivacyissue.com/government-surveillance/battle-c...
New Zealand is a member of the so-called Five Eyes Collective so the NSA likely has full access to all personal data of New Zealanders, let alone everyone else in the region:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/05/new-zealand-...
Corporations and governments have an obsession with tracking individuals, although probably for different reasons (profits and tax collection being the main goals, I imagine, with 'social credit score' as a newer more dystopian concept). This is well-documented in the US and no doubt applies to NZ as well:
> "As we have documented at The Privacy Issue, pacts with U.S. intelligence are a mix of cooperation with, and infiltration by, three-letter agencies. Though nearly every major Big Tech company has cooperated with the NSA's surveillance programs in some way, the Google cloud was notably backdoored via clandestine means that were likely unknown to the company, with NSA agents gleefully bragging about the infiltration in an internal presentation."
https://theprivacyissue.com/government-surveillance/battle-c...
New Zealand is a member of the so-called Five Eyes Collective so the NSA likely has full access to all personal data of New Zealanders, let alone everyone else in the region:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/05/new-zealand-...