Yahoo Inc. posted a note last week saying it was “pleased to announce” that it had gotten thousands of pages of court documents released that detail its battle to prevent the National Security Agency from collecting data about some of its users.

The NSA intended to use the data to gather intelligence on non-Americans outside the United States. Yahoo refused, saying it objected to “overbroad surveillance.” The courts repeatedly ruled in the NSA’s favor. The government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day – or about 2 percent of its daily revenue – if it didn’t comply. And the company eventually relented.

“We had to fight every step of the way to challenge the U.S. government’s surveillance efforts,” the company now says. “Our fight continues.”

More than a little hypocrisy is baked into those sentences. Tech firms’ business models depend on espionage of a much more intimate and far-reaching nature than what the NSA undertakes.

Like many free email services, Yahoo collects a lot of data about its customers (name, age, phone number and so on) when they sign up. It also scans their emails, stores them, searches them for key terms and then charges advertisers to target its users. Such arrangements accounted for about 75 percent of Yahoo’s 2013 revenue.

There’s a difference, of course, between a state conducting surveillance and a private company doing so. For one thing, the state has the power of arrest and detention. But a vast and intricate, though imperfect, legal apparatus limits precisely what data the NSA can collect and what can be done with it.

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