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I've seen a few things pop up about ISPs and selling user data. Some of this is a bit worrying (especially since I seen at least one seeming-scam purporting to
by blhack 10y ago
I've seen a few things pop up about ISPs and selling user data. Some of this is a bit worrying (especially since I seen at least one seeming-scam purporting to "buy congress's browser history"):
As far as I know, nobody is looking to make browser history available for purchase. It's unlikely that anybody aside from the NSA or some other state-actor, with very significant resources available to them, is even capable of storing that data.
Ask yourself this question: can you currently buy all of, for instance, Jeff Session's private facebook data? Every message he's ever sent, like he's made, etc.?
Of course not.
What you can do, and what ISPs are very possibly looking to do, is make general demographic information available to advertisers.
For instance: if a person has shown a recent interest in camping, show them ads for camping equipment.
Now, I absolutely do not think that this is acceptable (ISPs sharing data, however I do think that facebook giving me targeted advertisements is a perfectly reasonable exchange).
I just think that it's important to know what is being talked about. Especially when it comes to people trying to scam others for money.
- tw04 10y agoThere are two different questions there. Can I personally buy the info? No. Is that information currently for sale? I have no idea. Just because it isn't being sold publicly doesn't mean it isn't being sold at all. Furthermore, comparing Facebook to ISPs is ridiculous. If Facebook pisses me off, I stop using it and I'm slightly inconvenienced. On the flip side, if my ISP pisses me off, I have literally no other choice in ISPs. I would go without internet beyond tethering to my phone, which means pretty much just basic email (IE: no internet). So your comparison is... bad. Furthermore, for you to suggest the cards against humanity guys are running a scam shows complete ignorance of the company and the group of people behind it. Literally 0 chance they're trying to scam people.
- blhack 10y agoI'm talking about this: https://www.gofundme.com/BuyCongressData https://www.gofundme.com/BuyCongressData And this: https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory
- jjoonathan 10y agoThis is HN, not a cocktail party. We've seen post after post about using the "demographic targeting" capabilities of facebook and google to target individuals, about the more general problem of de-anonymizing data, and about how damn hard this type of "abuse" is to prevent even if companies were interested in spending serious resources to prevent it. We further understand that while this type of loophole exploitation is beyond the interest of the vast majority of people, there is an entire swamp of gray-market software developers willing to package the loopholes into nice user-friendly tools in exchange for a handful of bitcoin. The cards against humanity stunt may well be a scam, but it's not nearly so damaging as the scam of pretending that ISP sales of user data will preserve privacy.