[themafia]

My deep suspicion, given some of the players involved in DOGE, is that most of this information is being exfiltrated for the purposes of training AI models. They'll likely be used for social and political manipulation of groups and possibly even individuals. There's a big market for "pre-crime" solutions which will also rely heavily on this type of data and are already being deployed by various state-level law enforcement agencies.

The coming of the "digital caste" society powered by "social credit" scores seems to be the end game. This is a battle of the rich and powerful against the average citizen and they want to reduce all of us back into fiefdom. We can no longer trust a large federal or even state government with these tools.

[xtiansimon]

Is there talk about DOGE working to combine various government databases as a new data project for the government?

[xtiansimon]

Oh Boy. Saw the links today—Maybe it’s the National Design Studio?

I worked in marketing during Web 1.0–the brochureware era. I know all too well the difference between then and the modern web today.

What’s the point if it’s not to unify design AND data?!

[emsign]

This is a realistic concern. I can't understand why peopleare downvoting it.

[matheweis]

There are at least two reasons:

First is Hanlon’s Razor; “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. It appears to be especially applicable here.

Second is that this kind of information (with far richer data) is already accessible to and used by corporations at scale; think credit bureaus, background checkers, etc.

[aeve890]

>First is Hanlon’s Razor

Those "razors" (Occam's, Hanlon's, etc) are just heuristics, not axioms. At what point you're supposed to stop assuming root cause is just stupidity? given the priors one can perfectly asume malice right away.

[tyleo]

I agree with Hanlon’s Razor to some extent but it does fail to provide accountability, “they aren’t cruel, just incompetent so the behavior is okay.”