I don't see how the FBI buying data that's for sale in the open market is any worse than the likes of Equifax doing so, and no-one seems to care about that.
This is what is extremely strange to me (by principle). When the government does it, it seems to make many more headlines and people are outraged, but when a company does it, there is far more acceptance.
In principle, it should be far more concerning to see private entities getting access to personal data - because they operate without any opportunity for the public to be involved (their pure tyrannies in a sense) and are completely opaque, but the government is far more transparent and the one institution which you can change by democratic involvement.
Of course, this type of data gathering is concerning in any case, but the government is the last on the list of entities we should be worried about having it.
Government surveillance is supposed to require a warrant. Efforts to bypass that requirement are scandalous because the warrant requirement is there to protect against tyranny of the majority. It's a known failure mode of democratic governments and the check on government power is important.
Corporate surveillance is a different beast because people can choose which corporations they do business with, absent market consolidation. We are not absent market consolidation, but it's that which is the scandal, not what would otherwise be voluntary associations between private parties.
> We are not absent market consolidation, but it's that which is the scandal, not what would otherwise be voluntary associations between private parties.
This is the crux of it, it's not voluntary association to be a participant in the surveillance economy. If I didn't live in the EU this would be my train of thought: I didn't choose it, I just accessed a website that had trackers and eventually that data is sold, I wasn't willing to do it and the contract for it is buried somewhere and simply by accessing it I've implicitly given the system tacit agreement to get my data scooped up.
That's why I believe GDPR was a major advancement for data privacy, I can actually choose to block trackers or to not access a website if they make it hard to not be tracked.
In here though I talked explicitly about GDPR and data privacy in the surveillance economy sense.
I'm not discussing encryption or government overreach on privacy matters in the EU in general, unsure why it is brought up in this thread, care to expand?
> Government surveillance is supposed to require a warrant.
No, invasive government surveillance is supposed to require a warrant. Invasive is defined as a search of your 'person, house, papers, or effects'.
A third party's records on you aren't your person, house, papers, or effects. They are records concerning you, but they are not your records.
The government (just like every other government in the world) doesn't need a warrant to receive a tip, to ask your neighbour if they want to volunteer/sell any information about you, or to surveil you when you go about your public activities.
I'm sure you didn't consent to be the subject of that tip, or to your neighbour snitching on you. That still doesn't mean that it's not a legitimate form of surveillance.
Did you consent to the long list of trackers and brokers? Charles Schwab communicates your web activities to Facebook and many others, even before you log in or have even signed up. Did you consent to that?
Corporate surveillance is different because corporations can't throw you in jail, can't send police and such at you. That's all.
The fact that government involvement is needed is really semantics. No one affected by this decision could hold the officials responsible for this decision accountable, so the government is really an arm of the corporation at this point. This is inevitable when consolidation of wealth/power isn’t limited.
Historically, there are several instances of governments accumulating more and more power until they turn into a totalitarian state and remove freedoms from their citizens. I don't know of any companies who have abused their power to that extent.
Historically (and currently) there are many companies that directly or indirectly working to limit freedoms, either alone or complicit with governments. Corporations are powerful and in many places have as much power over people as governments. It can be as varied as surveillance (Cisco in China) to murdering opponents (Shell in Nigeria), to industry lobbying. Look around and you'll find many more.
The solution to the problem is to go down the EU route of reducing the rights of anyone to collect all this information and make it harder to access that which is collected. It's by no means perfect but it is the right direction.
> taking testimony from all the principals, including Rockefeller Sr., who testified that, even after knowing that guards in his pay had committed atrocities against the strikers, he "would have taken no action" to prevent his hirelings from attacking them.
Well, private industries don’t have a “monopoly on violence”. The number of things that a private company can do to me pale in comparison to what the government can do
On the other hand, the US is essentially an oligarchy masquerading as a democratic republic, and the relationship between Big Tech (particularly the big social media silos) and three-letter agencies/the military industrial complex is disturbingly incestuous. Government having the monopoly on violence doesn't imply corporate power is benign when people are killed over their metadata.
Private industries routinely buy government officials with a monopoly on violence, and regular citizens have no recourse to remove those officials so the distinction is meaningless.
Go through history and tally up the human rights violations done by companies and govts and see who the leader is.
The govt has an army, police, and jails. The govt has legal means to use violence against people and deny them their freedoms. Any company that could do that would be doing it with the blessing of the govt first, which kinda just makes them a govt contractor.
Govt having information is not the same as a company who just wants to pre-approve you for a loan or show you a YouTube ad.
> This is what is extremely strange to me (by principle). When the government does
it, it seems to make many more headlines and people are outraged, but when a company does it, there is far more acceptance.
Exactly, and all it needs to keep people calm is to create a puppet advertising company that does its job and covertly pass the data to govt organizations, or infiltrate an established one. Problem is that personal data mining has become vital for our modern toxic economy, so I don't see how the practice could go away anytime soon, especially when those making the laws and those taking advantage from it are essentially the same entities.
While I do agree that this data should be available for purchase at all, private companies don't have the same authority as the government.
Equifax can use it to alter my credit score and could have implication on a future credit application.
The FBI can use it as justification for a federal investigation that they may have otherwise had no justification for. They also have the ability to work with other branches of the government to file criminal charges and throw a person in prison for the rest of their life. I'm well aware that's a huge jump, but the point is the level of risk between a private company buying data and the FBI buying data is entirely different.
private companies can't take the data and put you in prison for something they find out about you in it - sure, they can use it to try and sell you more widgets - but having your data weaponized against your civil rights by an all-powerful central government with the power to take away all your civil rights seems a lot worse to me.
1. Equifax collection is more or less voluntary. It's triggered on taking out loans, carrying debt, etc. The reason I said more or less is people need to do these things to live these days.
2. The FBI can abduct you, put you in a cage, and/or kill you.
I've been doing some experimentation in ChatGPT with this, and it is amazing.
With just slightly different ChatGPT query prompts, extremely different, conflicting narratives for a given event can be produced, and each of them sounds/seems perfectly reasonable, and True.
For someone to be invulnerable to this sort of thing, they would have to have fairly substantial background in several different obscure domains (none of which are taught in school, quite conveniently), as well as violate several strongly enforced social norms (ie: engaging in "pedantry", thinking in ways we've been trained to pattern match to conspiratorial thinking, falling for Russian propaganda, etc).
It does not surprise me in the least how much polarization there is in society over what is actually going on, and how each side genuinely believes that they are take on it is correct. It seems (to me) almost like the system has been deliberately designed to produce this output, because it certainly isn't that hard to figure out how to vastly improve on it.