[trymas]

Noob question: how private orgs can do surveillance that government can’t?

Could I - as an individual - do such surveillance[1]? Won’t three letter agency knock on my door? Is there a difference between digital surveillance and physical surveillance?

[1] obviously at smaller scale, but imagine same level of creepiness.

[red-iron-pine]

create an LLC and start doing online marketing ("online marketing").

you're a marketing company. you're gathering data for data mining that you will sell to other brokers. lots of small or niche marketing firms out there.

could you do it as one (1) person? might be hard. but you and a few coworkers / employees is perfectly reasonable.

chances are you won't sell directly to the government but to an aggregator, but it's not crazy to think that a small org could potentially sell to the gub'mnt if the data is juicy enough. would have to be very niche stuff though, like maps of labor / union folks, or data tracking Islamic prayer app use, etc.

keep in mind that being a government vendor means you have to jump through certain hoops, and those can be onerous, but again, not theoretically impossible.

[awakeasleep]

Not as an individual but as a business basically yes