Congressman confronts FBI over “egregious” unlawful search of his personal data

Section 702 unlikely to be reauthorized without reforms to protect US citizens.

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[TheShark]

I kind of wish someone would play the villan in this arena. Collect data on important people and do something socially bad but perfectly legal. Then tell the the people who complain to put up or shut up. Maybe if you embarrassed or anger anough people this way something will happen? Idk, guess there is too much money to be made for people to risk this strategy

Sounds like a plan. Unfortnately, it's an expensive plan. Yesterdays article on the FBI buying location data got me thinking. You can buy feeds of location data, much of it coming from phone apps. With that you should be able to find location history of people who work somewhere. From what I can gather, some of those feeds include the IP address of the reporting device. So I can go to a second company and buy web browsing feeds. Which also sometimes include the reporting IP address. A little cross-correlation should provide a nice summary of the browsing habits of most people who work at a particular place. And of course they all go home at night, so tie in feeds of address geolocations and property ownership records. That'll help identify which individuals go with each web browsing history. Bonus points if you can find any record of spending a few hours but not the whole night at a hotel. Wrap it all up in a pretty web front end and advertise it with slogans like "How does your congressman spend their time?"

How is this not already a thing? Given the total lack of regulation around the data broker business, what exactly stops someone from doing this? The expense is probably a big part of it. The few details I could find about pricing makes it sound like these feeds are at least $5K/month, and maybe a lot more (unsurprisingly details are scarce. "Call for a quote" is the most common price). If you need multiple feeds, plus probably a fair amount of compute to process it, it's probably a million dollars per year project or more. You'll probably want to have some good lawyers on retainer as well, because legal or not I would expect some fallout. It's not something I'm going to do, but I would expect that every intelligence service out there has done it.

But back on topic, no matter how little trust you have in the FBI you should probably have even less trust for all the other actors that can buy access to some of this data.

 

[TheShark]

Up to that last part, this already is happening.

All that data is being purchased and aggregated and formed into a detailed picture about you.

It’s called “surveillance advertising” by more and more people for a reason.

There are two reasons they don’t do that last part, and sell direct identifiable access to an amalgamation of someone’s digital (and in some cases offline) life directly.

The first is that they want to maintain the fiction that what they’re doing is anonymized enough that people shouldn’t worry about them just doing it to show you personalized ads.

The second is that giving up that much information on an individual is selling the golden goose. The most successful and comprehensive data aggregators, are the ones making the most money off personalized ad placements created with that data. If they sell the data, someone can use it to compete with their ad platform.

You’re basically asking, “Why doesn’t Facebook sell Facebook profiles in bulk?”

It’s not because Facebook gives a shit about your privacy, it’s because Facebook doesn’t want to feed their competition their biggest advantage.

This sure looks like unaggregated browsing data to me. They claim 400 billion records. And this sure looks like unaggregated location data, coming from 700 million active devices monthly.

FB is FB. Yeah, they collect their own data and don't share it directly. It's one company. But for all the other data, there is no singular "they". It's dozens and dozens of companies collecting, buying, selling, aggregating, trading, etc etc etc. I agree with your first reason that the data brokers want to maintain the fiction that it's all anonymous aggregated data. Keeping what they are doing hidden from the general public is key to keeping the whole business going.

I don't agree with the second one. The successful data aggregators building up marketing profiles aren't doing it with data they collected themselves by and large. They buy that data from a bunch of other companies who are probably in turn buying it from others. It's a whole ecosystem. And given its so many independent companies I'm amazed that they have managed to keep the scale of the raw data that's available hidden.