That's why information in government hands can be more dangerous than in corporate. A good example is when Nazis occupied Holland they used governmental data on religion (collected to properly allocate funds for places of worship) to track jews and send them to the camps.
So data in corporate hands is bad, but governmental data can be even worse.
Freedom of movement, association, speech, religion, bodily autonomy and more... All down the drain.
All you need is a bit of collision between government media and tech and you're golden.
Let me tell you what companies can do: they can make lists and pass it privately around to deny you gainful employment, loans, investment, etc. They can also sell it to the government, subverting privacy and due process rights.
If you are hiding information that would cause people not to do business with you that is almost fraud.
But in all seriousness, you should know it is actually possible to use data towards good aims. Policy makers can use data to produce better answers to questions exploring issues like poverty, disease, crime, financial literacy, etc. Setting up a massive survey is slow and extremely expensive, and that makes it extremely hard to iterate on findings. Getting answers years quicker makes it possible for the government to develop better policies, and that's a good thing. Sure the Nazis were evil, and information enabled the Nazis to be more efficient and effective at implementing evil policies. But an un/less-informed government isn't a goal to strive for. Good government implementing good policies is a goal worth striving for, as there are some problems that can only be addressed at government scale.
Considering I know what kind of data is available, I sincerely doubt this is what is happening. Does that mean, that it's all super evil bad bad stuff, nah, but it is exploitable for evil for sure.
In highly competitive markets people use stupid things to deny people opportunities.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist:
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious.
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition The State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California Press. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
In your comment, what you confuse is capacity for violence (inherent in all actors, state, individual, corporate, or non-governmental institutional, with numerous extant examples of each) with the Weberian definition of a monopoly on the legitimate claim to violence. In practice, enacting violence on virtually any actor will engender some counterveiling response, though the effectiveness will vary greatly depending on the comparative power and/or disinhibition of the entity responding.
There are numerous examples of private corporations or non-governmental actors engaging in violence, with or without state support or sanction. There are the 100 million souls lost, respectively, to the British East India Company's occupation and administration (as a private entity, with military powers) of India, of the transatlantic slave trade by numerous private commercial operators, and of the genocide against the indigenous populations of the Americas, again much by privately-chartered corporations (as the original British colonies were). There are extant mercenary forces such as Constellis (formerly Academi, formerly Xe, formerly Blackwater) in the US, or the Wagner Group presently transacting genocide in Ukraine. There are oil companies who have initiated coups, paramilitary actions, and assassinations throughout the world. There is the Pinkerton Agency, still extant, and with a storied role in violence against labour and civil rights movements. There are railroads, with their own (private) police forces, which are in fact registered as law enforcement despite being nongovernmental.
The truth is that there is no clean distinction between State and Private use of force, lethal or otherwise. What there is in government is, one hopes, legitimacy and accountability to the citizenry rather than to creditors and investors.