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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 ev
by 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 agoSome of us think both of those things should be illegal.
- cratermoon 1y agoThe 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2 https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/05/data-broker-protection-rule-quietly-withdrawn-by-cfpb https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/05/data-broker-p...