Re: Once the info is in government hands it is subject to Freedom of Information requests
That may well be the case, yes, but subject to a request does not mean that request be required to be honoured: there are all sorts of get-out clauses government has recourse to, not least being the age old "Oh, the cat's eaten it!" or whatever pitiful fabrication they come up with to explain why, no, you may not have that information; and, if not, they can always simply lie about what they have, if they even feel the need to go to the effort (they can legitimately send you some whilst declaring that it is incomplete for <some reason you can't dispute because 'national security'>).
By and large I imagine that most people making requests see everything held about them because, by and large, most of us are uninteresting and the data held simply dully bureaucratic - name, D.o.B., address, inside-leg measurement, which political party we vote for, that sort of thing.
But the idea that any government that wants to withhold information will nevertheless feel bound to honour any and every F.o.I. request because it would be very very naughty of it not to is, frankly, the stuff of fairytales - if they tell you they have nothing on you (now piss off and stop bothering them) then that is the news as far as you are concerned and it's unlikely you'll ever prove otherwise; even should you do so and 'investigations rigorously pursued' and 'lessons learned', no-one will ever be held to account unless it be some lowly junior whose future is sacrificed for the greater good of the responsible parties (no, I'm not cynical, I'm experienced and realistic).
Be all that as it may, however, yes, you're absolutely right, it's six of one, half a dozen of the other and I don't much like the look of the megacorps; added to which, I don't trust them to look after the data properly any more than I do some civil servant taking their work home for the weekend not to forget it in the station bar.
But, my original point was really about Blackberry not being a company I would trust with my data because they made all their claims about being on the side of the customer/user and protecting their data with the most sophisticatedly secure solution in the world, only for it to transpire that they had secretly been sharing it with governments, so, they can't be trusted - the 'front for GCHQ' thing was just a bit of playful hyperbole to get your attention ;-)