Comment by tehwebguy
1 year ago
We are going to learn so many disturbing things that data brokers (which includes basically every large corporation) are doing in the next years.
1 year ago
We are going to learn so many disturbing things that data brokers (which includes basically every large corporation) are doing in the next years.
Unless senior managers and board members get criminal convictions and jail time it will continue and the "disturbing" will cease only by being normalized.
Hoping for a magic responsible all powerful legal daddy to come enforce a just set of laws is pure fantasy.
The people doing regulation and oversight have been bought and paid for by these "managers and board members." Citizens united codified their right to do this into law.
If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild.
No congress-member is going to wake up and be like "gee, I sure wish I would get a few less bribes (campaign contributions) today," or "I sure would like my stock portfolio to decrease in value by doing real oversight on all these companies that are making me rich."
If the legal system cannot provide consequences to these people, then it's time to start thinking about where those consequences are going to come from. Hoping for consequences is not a very good strategy. A union is one such vehicle.
> No congress-member is going to wake up and be like "gee, I sure wish I would get a few less bribes (campaign contributions) today," or "I sure would like my stock portfolio to decrease in value by doing real oversight on all these companies that are making me rich."
Neither of these is actually applicable here.
GM makes its money from selling cars (and financing for cars). If someone offers them a little extra for the data, they might take it, but they really don't care.
Neither do the insurance companies, except that if their competitors do it then so do they. If any insurance company has the data then they raise rates on the higher risk drivers and turf them to the ones without it, which puts them out of business. But if they're all banned from using it then they're all on a level playing field and again nobody really cares.
All you'd need is a law prohibiting insurance companies from using telemetrics and that would be the end of that. The main lobby against it would be the data brokers in this specific submarket, but they're hardly Big Auto and The Banks.
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>If you want professional ethics, you have to create a vehicle that can enforce professional ethics or wield political power -- a trade union or guild.
How's that working with police and/or teacher's unions?
Moreover, it's unclear how "professional ethics" would interact with legal and/or business decisions. If you think it's unethical and the legal department says it's A-okay, then what? For professions like engineering you could plausibly make the case that engineers should have the final say on decisions involving safety or structural soundness, but that's less convincing for business decisions. For instance would civil engineers be expected to reject building a luxury condo on "professional ethics" grounds because the the building would gentrify the neighborhood and displace marginalized groups?
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If the health insurance industry is several times larger than car insurance then there must be a very high financial motive for Ancestry/23&me to sell your curious aunt's DNA data which is also linked to relations.
At least the health insurance industry is legally prohibited from charging different rates to people based on DNA. So, at most, they can use it to try to get you specialized care.
They'll sell the data to potential employers so they can avoid hiring people that may have expensive diseases to treat.
No shit. Plus 23 and me is in deep financial trouble last I heard. Someone out there is drooling over that data set.
I know otherwise smart people (in the analytical sense) who paid money to hand over their most sensitive biometrics to these companies. And they’re still like “the data brokers can have it, what are they gonna do?”
And hopefully rein them in.
Without extremely aggressive changes to how we handle situations like this, it seems unlikely
A fine is a price, and there are basically no laws that put financial, let alone criminal liability for people behind the corporate veil or seizure/dissolution of a corporation that consistently breaks the law on the table
Whenever the GDPR is mentioned here, people more or less treat it as a sign of fascism. With that attitude from us, how can our rights on privacy be respected?
I'm extremely glad that the GDPR and NOYB.eu mean that car manufacturers can't pull that shit here. If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
The problem with the GDPR is the overhead. If it was one line that said "you can't sell data on people without their explicit freely given consent" then anybody could comply with it by simply not selling data on people.
But it's a long piece of legislation and some of the requirements are time-consuming to implement even if you're not doing anything nefarious. "It is bad for innocent people to incur uncompensated costs" should be a primary principle in creating legislation.
> If I opt out, I'm opted out, or there will be big fines for them.
They're getting sued. If the plaintiffs win they'll have to pay. It's not obvious why this is worse or any less of a deterrent.
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How? Who will represent that viewpoint in the halls of congress? The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
> The EFF is politically ineffective and always has been for reasons I don't understand, and no one else seems to care.
Going by the EFF's latest published financials (2022), they took in $23 million vs $16.6 million in expenses. Vs literal billionaires and nation states. Some of the billionaires have more money than the nation states do. David, meet Goliath.
I care. I give them my money. They seem to do a better job at advancing these interests than anyone else. I'm more in awe of their attempts to take on issues of this magnitude given their meager resources than anything else.
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Let’s think outside the box a little. What we need is a general process whereby the public gets to decide if a business should exist. Too often companies just form, abuse us, and there is no way to stop them. What if, once a year, companies had to justify their existence in front of a citizen panel or a jury of random people or something? They’d need to demonstrate what good the public receives from their existence, or their assets get sold and the company dissolved. Why do we believe that companies simply have a natural right to exist as long as they can survive? Where did this come from? Companies should answer to the public!
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Nah we're just here busy banning tiktok
China bad whirrrrrrrrr.
If con-gress was serious, theyd ban/restrict any social media that relied on tracking. Or better yet, they'd pass a bill restricting data brokers of any sort ala GDPR.
Nope. China bad. USA good!
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Of course not. Congress and SCOTUS are all paid for.
There needs to be a new "-flation" term for this (privacyflation?). Where we're also paying in terms of our privacy
It's cyberstalking, plain and simple.
panopticoflation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Why normalize a weird friendly term for spying?
There’s already a word: stalking.
spyflation
Personal bubble deflation
Corporate Voyeurism
A huge majority of my spam calls come from someone who bought it from ZoomInfo, Apollo, or other. I made a mistake somewhere and they got my personal number.
Now, every time I get a spam call, I insist they tell me where they're getting their info from. They'll try to so "our data team", but if you keep insisting they'll tell you.
These data exchange companies are despicable.
How long until a US equivalent of the GDPR ?
Once there are 32 or fewer Republicans in the Senate, so never.
Privacy legislation is antipartisan[0]: the US government relies on buying dox from adtech creeps to do all the spying they otherwise couldn't legally do, so nobody in power wants that loophole closed.
[0] Bipartisanly supported by the electorate and bipartisanly opposed by the elected representatives of said electorate
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