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The Dangers of Consolidating All Government Information

18 points by pseudolus 1y ago

cratermoon 1y ago
People are still fretting about the government having a big DB on everyone, meanwhile Meta, Google, Palantir, and who knows who else have multiple big DBs on everyone. They're buying and selling that data on the open market. The US government doesn't need to do anything but buy that data like anyone else.
- josefritzishere 1y ago
  Some of us think both of those things should be illegal.
  - cratermoon 1y ago
    The thing is, thanks to work done in Congress in the 1960s,[1] there are laws on the books constraining what governments can do. (Whether or not the current administration, or any prior administration, has respected those laws is a different question.) What's not on the books are laws about what private industry can do. Just the opposite: data brokers were set loose last month to sell any all information they wanted.[2] 1 https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/60-years-ago-congress-warned-us-about-the-surveillance-state-what-happened/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/60-years-ago-congress-war... 2 https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/05/data-broker-protection-rule-quietly-withdrawn-by-cfpb https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/05/data-broker-p...
deleted 1y ago
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rich_sasha 1y ago
One interesting eigenvector of world population is the trust in government. I can see that if you really don't trust your government, or its successors, you don't want them to have this info. I find this world view most prevalent in the US. In Europe people tend to trust the mechanisms of court-supervised access to information, and are thus more happy to share the info. In fact most European countries already have a centralized database, with some kind of citizen ID as primary key, and few people lose sleep over this. And stories of gross abuse are likewise rare. For completeness, I suppose other categories include states that do this, whose citizens can't complain (like say China) and those whose citizens don't trust the state, but the state lacks the technological acumen or scope to do this.
- JohnFen 1y ago
  > I find this world view most prevalent in the US. In all fairness, most recent events in the US have validated this view (in the US).

18 points by pseudolus 1y ago

People are still fretting about the government having a big DB on everyone, meanwhile Meta, Google, Palantir, and who knows who else have multiple big DBs on everyone. They're buying and selling that data on the open market. The US government doesn't need to do anything but buy that data like anyone else.

josefritzishere 1y ago
Some of us think both of those things should be illegal.
- cratermoon 1y ago
  The thing is, thanks to work done in Congress in the 1960s,[1] there are laws on the books constraining what governments can do. (Whether or not the current administration, or any prior administration, has respected those laws is a different question.) What's not on the books are laws about what private industry can do. Just the opposite: data brokers were set loose last month to sell any all information they wanted.[2] 1 https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/60-years-ago-congress-warned-us-about-the-surveillance-state-what-happened/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/60-years-ago-congress-war... 2 https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/05/data-broker-protection-rule-quietly-withdrawn-by-cfpb https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/05/data-broker-p...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

rich_sasha 1y ago

One interesting eigenvector of world population is the trust in government. I can see that if you really don't trust your government, or its successors, you don't want them to have this info. I find this world view most prevalent in the US. In Europe people tend to trust the mechanisms of court-supervised access to information, and are thus more happy to share the info. In fact most European countries already have a centralized database, with some kind of citizen ID as primary key, and few people lose sleep over this. And stories of gross abuse are likewise rare. For completeness, I suppose other categories include states that do this, whose citizens can't complain (like say China) and those whose citizens don't trust the state, but the state lacks the technological acumen or scope to do this.

JohnFen 1y ago
> I find this world view most prevalent in the US. In all fairness, most recent events in the US have validated this view (in the US).