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Hank Asher turned Americans’ private information into a business
- xtc283 3y agoHow does one uncover a LexID?
- thedudeabides5 3y ago[flagged]
- giuliomagnifico 3y agoThere shouldn’t is the paywall, I sent it as a gift, try again with this link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/magazine/hank-asher-data.html?unlocked_article_code=YfHbAc-JpI-5BpwCY-j1F3lRT5scZM3mEXvIWK7VhRi3o4flr2BTxn0VFzRKq56yUiMuwSdgIQf92teiAUt5kFac9hudCBwZCzeAALt4Payo6BbW6_1GPEkSvxlGkQrV_zyUL4-WM1MjQGSjFRPoXaEk35wnWhoJQoqke0Q81s_KVPKoBRnYrCmbpTW0f69uR0s55CQgoJaGhDVFm0aF7VJdXcS0qmRngLWrUMeOuhtFjaLK3YE1aQOfQyHYyKjz6PrB_SDCUndBdcq5xDO_wH88Y3IiFoXimViAp23j6imIx1V95b4by4ORnXwNaivFq3ZLUOSZHqGwPxE&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/magazine/hank-asher-data....
- fuball63 3y agoIt works for me, thanks!
- kibwen 3y agoI assume HN automatically strips the query string from submitted URLs, to deter things like tracking IDs and referral links.
- lightedman 3y agoWell, that gets annoying when the referral has the identifier that allows people to read the article for free. Perhaps the HN mods should act as actual editors instead of mods. Slashdot does it - it works when the editors actually pay attention. Let's see how closely HN's mods pay attention.
- tough 3y agoI assume this is automated away and might not be recoverable by dang et al, I've thought many times about making an archive bot for hn submissions, might go as well as build it, it's weird that in this site full of hacker no one has thought of it before, makes me think it's prohibited or something but I don't really think so, as archive links are generally permitted, maybe have a bot spam every comment section isn't ideal tho
- kitten_mittens_ 3y agoNytimes gift links only work for the first person that uses it, I believe.
- gnabgib 3y agoHN uses the canonical link (HTML -> HEAD -> Link=canonical) to reconcile the "true" URL to help with dupe detection. You can't submit a gift link since the canonical excludes that code. (You can always comment the link though, thank you!)
- darkhorn 3y agoClick the reading mode in Firefox mobile.
- ozan42 3y agohttps://archive.ph/uFN1R https://archive.ph/uFN1R (without a paywall)
- Mistletoe 3y agoThe privacy Antichrist, I guess I should have known one must exist somewhere.
- Loggias 3y ago[dead]
- envsubst 3y agoThe credit card industry existed for decades before this.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoI think making a product of the data itself is an innovation But to follow your lead, credit ratings go back to the 1880s, my favorite episode of "Backstory with the American History Guys" covers the topic: https://backstoryradio.org/shows/keeping-tabs-2016/ https://backstoryradio.org/shows/keeping-tabs-2016/
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoAcxiom started in the 1960's. They've been selling consumer data ever since.
- EMCymatics 3y agoThis is a far from new concept. "figured out" is misleading. He just built upon existing infrastructure.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago> They influence [...] how long I wait on hold when I call a customer-service line. say what?!
- flangola7 3y agoCall directing has been a practice for decades. Customers that bring in less revenue or are more likely to be a problem that consumes agent time and refund budgets get de-prioritized.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoI had no idea, I've just been living my life thinking the world is just and we all wait in the same line. Thinking back on it, when I heard "calls are answered in the order they are received" I never asked myself "what other order would they be answered in" xD :'<
- lotsofpulp 3y ago> I had no idea, I've just been living my life thinking the world is just and we all wait in the same line. The lines were not obvious, or there were simply fewer segmentations, when I was a kid. Now, you see it at the airport with 3 different levels (regular TSA/precheck/clear), based on how much you pay. You see it at theme parks like Disney world / six flags, and even there, there are multiple levels of priority you can buy. And I went to my county fair for the first time this year, and I was somehow surprised that you could pay more for skipping ahead on simple carnival rides, even for toddlers.
- tough 3y agoThe hyperfinancialization and commoditization of everything is what gets you
- hn_version_0023 3y agoNo. The despair is what gets you. It only gets you once you realize there are like a dozen people in the world who are legitimately *free*. The rest of us toil to make them happy. This unjust system should be razed to the ground.
- cobertos 3y agoI always wonder how this sort of data ends up escaping into the wild en-masse. Everytime I've come up against wanting public records they're not public by way of API public. They're always public with no easy way to get at them yourself en-masse, and no one is willing to write any code to get at them en-masse. Seems like the big players have cornered it Court records for instance
- cratermoon 3y ago“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago>Court records for instance I use neither email (for years now, a blessing!) nor have my own phone number (VOIP outbound, only). Anything requiring either gets a burner.email or my numeric pager. A recent civil court action requested both of these obsolete (to me) technologies, and the judge's clerk required that I sign an attestation upon leaving them unanswerable. Court records are public in my jurisdiction, and I choose to be "unreachable." ---- Regarding the linked-to article, a harrowing read (certainly)! US citizens are allowed, by law, to request a FREE COPY of everything LexusNexis has on them in their private consumer file.
- cj 3y agoRe: lexusnexus, i wish they provided their data in a more legible format. Last time i requested my data it was provided in such a way where the data needed to be cross referenced with a legend which itself needed to be cross referenced with yet another table which made the whole data dump unreadable.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
- 29athrowaway 3y agoHow to be happier: Add these to your /etc/hosts to prevent gratitious anxiety 127.0.0.1 nytimes.com 127.0.0.1 wsj.com 127.0.0.1 washingtonpost.com 127.0.0.1 cnn.com 127.0.0.1 foxnews.com
- hollerith 3y agoOn MacOS, you need 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 to block a site in my experience.
- plasticsoprano 3y agoIn my experience that has never been the case and 127.0.0.1 works just fine.
- Jerrrry 3y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=loopback+ip+address https://www.google.com/search?q=loopback+ip+address
- hollerith 3y agoMy experience of (127.0.0.1's failing to work) was about 7 to 10 years ago, and since 0.0.0.0 always continued to work, I lost interest in whether 127.0.0.1 ever started working again. Based on your report, I plan to stop informing people about the issue.
- koheripbal 3y ago[flagged]
- hedora 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dventimi 3y ago[dead]
- shortcake27 3y agoGood for him. Now it’s time to make it illegal to gather and/or sell personal information without explicit consent.
- mr_toad 3y ago> Now it’s time It was time 30 years ago.
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoI worked with a gentleman who worked with Asher. I learned a lot about databases and people's data through those conversations. I think the solution to data privacy is to require companies to provide the receipts of where they obtained the data. Know my age? I didn't tell you. You bought it? From whom? Follow up with them. No receipt? Fine paid directly to the individual. Make PII data property.
- bsder 3y ago> Make PII data property. No, PII should be treated as toxic, radioactive waste. If you lose it, you should get MASSIVE fines--multiple years of revenue level massive fines. This incentivizes companies to not even collect it and to dispose of it promptly. It also places a dollar value on it that is high enough that you have to understand the profit amount that it is worth. You won't collect it "just in case" since there is such a risk associated with holding it.
- dataflow 3y ago> No receipt? Fine paid directly to the individual. Make PII data property. Er, so anyone can keep your 'property' (data) without your consent by just paying you the statutory fee?
- digdugdirk 3y agoThe value of modern data analytics comes from the massive quantities they have available. Each individual piece of data is hardly worth anything. Make it easy to file a claim and set the fine at $100 per occurance and things would change rather quickly.
- dataflow 3y agoI think you missed the point? You're putting a price on people's privacy. Not everyone who feels their privacy is being violated really wants payment in exchange, they just don't want their privacy to be violated.
- jonas21 3y agoThe New York Times buys information from similar databases and uses it to determine the articles that are recommended to you on their site (among other things) [1]. Ironically, that may be the reason the submitter saw this article in the first place. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/privacy https://www.nytimes.com/privacy
- ako 3y agoThought this would be about mark zuckerberg….
- ds 3y agoA huge part of what we are building at https://redact.dev https://redact.dev is a unified software suite for managing all data about you and that you created.. To date, that has mostly been data you create yourself ( tweets, fb posts, discord DM's, emails, etc.. ) but the bigger challenge is creating a simple interface that allows people to manage all this data about you thats floating out there that you DIDNT create. Its not just data broker removals- Its alexa recordings, youtube search history, your mailing preferences, and like 9999 other things. Data brokers are just one part of it. I enjoy the work we do but it also sucks having to do it. Each endpoint is its own challenge and doing something as simple as automating removal from one database can take days of a developers time. It will be a beautiful day when this stuff gets outlawed eventually.
- paulpauper 3y ago$100s of millions of dollar of pre-ipo wealth. one step below paper wealth. It would seem like in the late 90s wealth was fleeting like that, not like today where ppl in tech seem to get rich and stay rich (like Stipe, Coinbbase, Dorpbox, and others). Riches to rags stories seemed more common 2-3 decades ago compared to today.