8 ms·
We are going to learn so many disturbing things that data brokers (which includes basically every large corporation) are doing in the next years.
by tehwebguy 3y ago
We are going to learn so many disturbing things that data brokers (which includes basically every large corporation) are doing in the next years.
- two_handfuls 3y agoAnd hopefully rein them in.
- advael 3y agoWithout extremely aggressive changes to how we handle situations like this, it seems unlikely A fine is a price, and there are basically no laws that put financial, let alone criminal liability for people behind the corporate veil or seizure/dissolution of a corporation that consistently breaks the law on the table
- KerrAvon 3y agoHow? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
- irq 3y ago> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care. Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath. I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
- ryandrake 3y agoLet’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
- callalex 3y agoWhat about all the employees of the company that don’t set policy, aka the vast majority of the employees?
- advael 3y agoAll change is destructive. No matter how bad something is, someone depends on how it is right now. Someone will at the very least be inconvenienced by it changing The fact is, no company actually primarily exists to employ people, and people lose their jobs to this basic fact all the time, sometimes for no reason other than that some investor expects extremely marginal gains from signaling that they are serious about cutting costs Also, the dissolution of a company and dispersal of its assets could include allocations for severance pay to cushion the blow if that's a concern, which is not always available to people who are hit by random layoffs
- ryandrake 3y agoPerhaps the threat of actual extreme punishment would incentivize companies to behave such that the punishment never gets invoked? Currently the worst thing companies ever face is a little itty bitty fine and maybe a toothless regulator telling them “Pretty please would you mind not doing that again? If it’s not too inconvenient to shareholders that is…”
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. If their assets get sold and one entity buys all of them then they could just carry on operating the same company with them. The most likely buyer for something like that would be a competitor. That seems bad. Maybe we could require the opposite. Their assets get sold, but can't all be sold to the same party. You split the company up, e.g. by delaminating vertically integrated components into separate companies. That way it's easier to enter the market and compete with any of them because you don't have to replicate the whole stack, only that one component. You might not even need to have a vote, just some rules for when this happens automatically, like when a company has more than e.g. 35% market share, because that's too close to a monopoly and you wouldn't want a trust to form. We could call this anti-trust.
- aaomidi 3y agoNah we're just here busy banning tiktok
- pierat 3y agoChina bad whirrrrrrrrr. If con-gress was serious, theyd ban/restrict any social media that relied on tracking. Or better yet, they'd pass a bill restricting data brokers of any sort ala GDPR. Nope. China bad. USA good!
- LoganDark 3y agoI agree data brokering of any kind should be completely illegal. I don't think tiktok is only being banned because of china though. I just think it's a bonus compared to bytedance legitimately being a malicious data-harvesting nightmare that also happens to own one of the most mentally damaging social networks of the decade
- adhamsalama 3y agoBut Meta/Google isn't?
- frankharv 3y agoIs Meta and Google even allowed in Communist China? Why would we reciprocate on a Communist plot against our children?
- plagiarist 3y agoOf course not. Congress and SCOTUS are all paid for.
- stavros 3y agoWhenever the GDPR is mentioned here, people more or less treat it as a sign of fascism. With that attitude from us, how can our rights on privacy be respected? I'm extremely glad that the GDPR and NOYB.eu mean that car manufacturers can't pull that shit here. If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThe problem with the GDPR is the overhead. If it was one line that said "you can't sell data on people without their explicit freely given consent" then anybody could comply with it by simply not selling data on people. But it's a long piece of legislation and some of the requirements are time-consuming to implement even if you're not doing anything nefarious. "It is bad for innocent people to incur uncompensated costs" should be a primary principle in creating legislation. > If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them. They're getting sued. If the plaintiffs win they'll have to pay. It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago> It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent. I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US, and much less common (and hush-hush in the rare cases where it does happen) in Europe. I'd also hazard a guess why it's less of a deterrent: the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower compared to the relatively high probability of a DPA going "WTF no" in Europe as soon as someone reports it.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago> I'd say it may not be obvious why, but it's obvious that it is less of a deterrent, because this sort of data trading seems to be commonplace and semi-overt in the US But that's because the US doesn't even have the law requiring express and freely given consent, so they just stick the consent in some agreement nobody reads next to a box you have to check. You could have that rule without having the whole GDPR. In this case they apparently collected the data even if you never checked the box, which is just egregious and now they're getting sued. > the risk, i.e. probability of successfully getting sued * cost of successfully getting sued, is likely much lower Certainly this is not because plaintiffs would be unwilling to file claims if they could.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- harry8 3y agoUnless senior managers and board members get criminal convictions and jail time it will continue and the "disturbing" will cease only by being normalized.
- hayst4ck 3y agoHoping for a magic responsible all powerful legal daddy to come enforce a just set of laws is pure fantasy. The people doing regulation and oversight have been bought and paid for by these "managers and board members." Citizens united codified their right to do this into law. If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild. No congress-member is going to wake up and be like "gee, I sure wish I would get a few less bribes (campaign contributions) today," or "I sure would like my stock portfolio to decrease in value by doing real oversight on all these companies that are making me rich." If the legal system cannot provide consequences to these people, then it's time to start thinking about where those consequences are going to come from. Hoping for consequences is not a very good strategy. A union is one such vehicle.
- gruez 3y ago>If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild. How's that working with police and/or teacher's unions? Moreover, it's unclear how "professional ethics" would interact with legal and/or business decisions. If you think it's unethical and the legal department says it's A-okay, then what? For professions like engineering you could plausibly make the case that engineers should have the final say on decisions involving safety or structural soundness, but that's less convincing for business decisions. For instance would civil engineers be expected to reject building a luxury condo on "professional ethics" grounds because the the building would gentrify the neighborhood and displace marginalized groups?
- hayst4ck 3y agoI think a union is a tool like a gun. A gun can be used to steal money. A gun can be used to keep your home safe. A gun can be used to protect your country from foreign invaders. The gun is amoral. How do you stop a bad guy with a gun? Ironically, the people generally most anti-union know the answer to that question the best. The police union demonstrates that unions work. They have completely removed police oversight and made officers exist generally above the law and provided incredible overtime pay. That is not an anti-union argument, that's a why the hell aren't you in a union argument. Teachers unions are more complicated because teachers care more about the children than themselves and that creates a problem because in order to act in their own self interest by exercising union power they have to harm children and maybe even a generation of them. Of course one could also cogently argue that the general undesirability of being a teacher is and has been harming children for decades.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoA huge majority of my spam calls come from someone who bought it from ZoomInfo, Apollo, or other. I made a mistake somewhere and they got my personal number. Now, every time I get a spam call, I insist they tell me where they're getting their info from. They'll try to so "our data team", but if you keep insisting they'll tell you. These data exchange companies are despicable.
- krackers 3y agoThere needs to be a new "-flation" term for this (privacyflation?). Where we're also paying in terms of our privacy
- tareqak 3y agospyflation
- peteradio 3y agoPersonal bubble deflation
- xgkickt 3y agoCorporate Voyeurism
- callalex 3y agoThere’s already a word: stalking.
- mlfreeman 3y agoIt's cyberstalking, plain and simple.
- hayst4ck 3y agopanopticoflation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
- thfuran 3y agoWhy normalize a weird friendly term for spying?
- LelouBil 3y agoHow long until a US equivalent of the GDPR ?
- callalex 3y agoOnce there are 32 or fewer Republicans in the Senate, so never.
- kmeisthax 3y agoPrivacy legislation is antipartisan[0]: the US government relies on buying dox from adtech creeps to do all the spying they otherwise couldn't legally do, so nobody in power wants that loophole closed. [0] Bipartisanly supported by the electorate and bipartisanly opposed by the elected representatives of said electorate
- brikym 3y agoIf the health insurance industry is several times larger than car insurance then there must be a very high financial motive for Ancestry/23&me to sell your curious aunt's DNA data which is also linked to relations.
- HWR_14 3y agoAt least the health insurance industry is legally prohibited from charging different rates to people based on DNA. So, at most, they can use it to try to get you specialized care.
- bonton89 3y agoThey'll sell the data to potential employers so they can avoid hiring people that may have expensive diseases to treat.
- klabb3 3y agoNo shit. Plus 23 and me is in deep financial trouble last I heard. Someone out there is drooling over that data set. I know otherwise smart people (in the analytical sense) who paid money to hand over their most sensitive biometrics to these companies. And they’re still like “the data brokers can have it, what are they gonna do?”
- airtonix 3y ago[dead]