23 Yahoo and Google, collecting private data on hundreds of millions of their members provide them with vast searchable data bases that they can sell to advertisers and other search parties. The exploitation of these data bases is a fundamental aspect of their business plans. Without such surveillance of their users, social media companies would not be able to turn a profit. Indeed, they may be more aptly called surveillance media rather than social media. For those of us who use them to post pictures and communicate, any notion of personal privacy is largely illusionary. To be sure, there is a distinction to made between the surveillance of our activities to which we voluntarily agree in exchange for the benefits and conveniences that we gain from social media, search engines, and other Internet companies, and the surveillance done by government to which we do not voluntarily invite-- or want. We willingly waive our privacy for corporations but not for governments. What the public might not fully realize, however, is that all the personal information in data bases of private companies can be accessed by the government if it obtains a court order or search warrant. As Snowden himself pointed out, “If Facebook is going to hand over all of your messages, all of your wall posts, all of your private photos, all of your private details from their server, the government has no need to intercept all of the communications that constitute those private records." These Internet companies, even if they are only interested in exploiting the data for its own profit, cannot refuse to share this information with the NSA, FBI and other agencies of the government if they have a court-ordered search warrant, Consequently, all the information these private corporations collect about us is legally available to any municipal, state and federal authority that obtains a warrant from a court. And such search warrants are routinely issued. That reality became evident to me in my investiga