7 ms·
U.S. Spy Agencies–One-Stop Shop to Buy Your Personal Data
- joecool1029 1y agohttps://archive.ph/SEkrr https://archive.ph/SEkrr
- sixothree 1y agoEven if it is not this particular dataset, are there markets where I can get my own personal information?
- micromacrofoot 1y agodata brokers, absolute scum of the earth imo though
- amelius 1y agoWhy they aren't banned is beyond me. Well, perhaps the article explains it. Meanwhile, so called "privacy watchdogs" are toothless.
- advisedwang 1y agoIn general no. Databrokers are not interesting in doing retail, and especially not interested in transparency.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoCalifornia residents can force the data broker mafia to delete their records.
- aspenmayer 1y agoHow do you prove a negative, legally?
- jandrewrogers 1y agoThis is not a retail industry. Companies are created for the specific customers they intend to serve. I can't imagine there being enough revenue to justify creating a company for retail customers, you'd have to deal with a company like Lexis-Nexis. Many of these companies don't know the identity of the people to which the data pertains.
- ndegruchy 1y agoSo we can't dragnet surveil our own people? Hmm, how about we just buy it from the folks who do it for work? Then _we're_ not doing it. _We're_ just buying a bundle of data from a broker. Couple this with the idea that we soft-spy on our Allies and then trade that data for their spying on our people and yeah, wow.
- bilbo0s 1y agoIn all honesty it wouldn't even matter. If the data brokers sell data, then even if they didn't sell it to the government, they would sell it to "PR/Lobbying Firms" who lobby the government. They would sell it to "security contracting firms" who the government contracts with to, um, escort "aid" shipments to widows and orphans in places like Yemen or Colombia, or Nebraska. And so on and so forth. The fundamental mistake was never about the government. The fundamental mistake was in allowing the data brokers to exist, collect, and sell the data in the first place.
- iugtmkbdfil834 1y agoAnd once there is a cottage industry in place and money is rolling, any attempt to adjust by privacy conscious portion of the population will be neutered or overruled by aggressive lobbying. And that is assuming the amoral entities having access to all that data won't attempt to use it to put a finger on a scale.
- potato3732842 1y agoAnd the lobbying dollars will go twice as far because the existence of the industry benefits the government. Whereas a normal industry has to fight an uphill lobbying battle where the courts and enforcers and legislators extract the maximal pound of flesh at every step the government will bend over backward to make it go easy for the privacy invasion industry. The only ways these status quos change is when people hate the industry so much that being in bed with it threatens the reelection of the politicians and the legitimacy of the institutions can the tide shift.
- lenerdenator 1y agoTyranny can always come to you. All you can do is try to be prepared.
- sockp0pp3t 1y agoLike a number of NGOs, this is another example of US Federal Govt breaking the law by proxy, i.e. paying private orgs to break the law for them.
- arminiusreturns 1y agoThird party doctrine is what they abuse to do this.
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoOver 30y I've learned that surveillance overreach by Govs never stops or even slows down. Only reporting by the press does. I'm hoping that a historically overt, abusive administration will kick news orgs out of their default complacency - and that they'll take surveillance seriously again. For a time. That said, I am sympathetic that mental bandwidth is a real issue ATM.
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- nicholasjarnold 1y ago"Flood the zone" => The specific strategy put forth and now enacted by the current US admin in order to overwhelm the media's ability to cover issues and therefore by extension the ability for the public at large to keep themselves informed. It's a fundamental attack on one of the pillars of democracy. Mental bandwidth saturation is a feature here, not a bug. Additionally, the gradual removal of personal privacy, and the normalization of it, is another attack on a democratic pillar. It really does seem like structural cracks are widening rapidly. I too hope that our current realities cause a sort of 'wake up' to occur in the minds of those whom are too busy, deep in "my team" politics or otherwise not concerned about what's going on right now.
- davidw 1y agoThe media does plenty of shooting itself in their own feet though. There was tons of coverage of Jake Tapper's book taking time away from everything that is happening right now.
- willcipriano 1y agoThe book about how the media covered up the president's decline?
- abridges6532 1y ago
- ashoeafoot 1y agoThe mighty CIA, unable to protect the military industrial complex. Until further notice, the spy agencies do nothing but rainmaking the American public.
- chrisweekly 1y agoI think "rainmaking" isn't the right word here.
- ashoeafoot 1y agorainmade is the act itself, what is the past to present version of this ?
- chrisweekly 1y agoI mean the concept of "rainmaking" -- to bring in $, in business terms "make it rain" means generate revenue, earn money, trigger positive economic outcomes. Which seems a far cry from the pejorative use you seemed to be going for. I'm not criticizing, I'm expressing confusion. Spy agencies don't "rainmake" the American public, that just doesn't make any sense.
- timewizard 1y agoThe CIA doesn't want to. It's more profitable to sell it out.
- stevetron 1y agoInteresting. This was supposedly in the _charter_ of the department of homeland security. It was supposed to be the controller of all intelligence (all agencies to dump their databases together), from all the spy agencies to prevent the intentional use-case of employing jumbo jet planes as weapons of mass destruction. And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS. Seems a little bit slow.
- potato3732842 1y agoWhen have the foreign and domestic intel agencies ever respected their own or anyone else's charter?
- m3047 1y ago> And forcing all cell phones of every design every where to have GPS. Cell phones need some kind of accurate-enough (GPS is arguably overkill) self-locating ability, because the encryption properties of the modulation make passive transmitter location and ranging determination difficult: they need to know when to switch between cell towers (ENodeB). Wiener functions are cool, and the RADAR applications were top secret during WW II.
- timewizard 1y agoI don't know of any strategy that uses GPS location to decide when to switch between towers. A tower could be offline for maintenance. You're probably going to want to use the signal strength from the tower as the strongest indicator of switching. Aside from that ENodeB uses GPS for timing. At the base station. In a way that does not require your phone to _also_ have GPS.
- jmkni 1y agoThere is an irony here that the first thing you see when you open this article is a prompt for your email address
- advisedwang 1y ago[flagged]
- alex1138 1y agoI am getting really tired of HN whataboutism (not exactly whataboutism in this case but close) as in the GP comment
- cornhole 1y agoI would be more accepting about my personal data being bought if I got paid for it
- TimeToBuild1 1y agoNice one
- webdoodle 1y agoCitizen's United broke the news media, by turning it into a pay per influence business, instead of journalism. Where are the Ida Tarbell's of our time? Most of them have been throttled, censored or completely suspended from most of the social media that they built up over the years, by the same rich parasitic influences that broke Citizen's United. Want to do something about it? Come to the Billionaire's SummerCamp in Sun Valley, Idaho on July 6th, and complain to the rich parasites themselves. Protest! Civil Disobedience! Justice! Or just got back to watching YouTube and delude yourself into thinking it will fix itself.
- nkh 1y agoIf I wanted to buy the data on myself to see what these brokers have. Is that possible? If so, Where should I go next?
- mmh0000 1y agoYou can start here: https://www.experian.com/small-business/target-prospects https://www.experian.com/small-business/target-prospects
- jeisc 1y agoWe are headed into more than one wall so we look to a strong man to save us from ourselves whatever the cost is. Our heard mentality rules in a time of crisis. The only serious question facing us now is about AI: are we trying to create a new life form better than our own species or a sublife slave expendable for our worst purposes and designs?