Comment by dylan604
1 month ago
These companies are so big now, and more importantly their lobbyists are, that it is unlikely any regulations would ever come that would limit their abilities to make money off of your PII.
1 month ago
These companies are so big now, and more importantly their lobbyists are, that it is unlikely any regulations would ever come that would limit their abilities to make money off of your PII.
All these already existing dragnets make oldies like the Clipper Chip seem like a weekend hackathon project.
The irony is that all of these metadata leaks and correlation attacks etc were theoretical at the time these technologies were created and developed, unless you’re NSA level compute power, both human and silicon. Now, any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing, and no one will care when they do besides the feds who cry foul about their turf being stepped on by plebeians. The public will never care because their eyes will already have glazed over once you mention MAC addresses and SSIDs.
> any script kid has enough info to try to build an array of SDRs to do the same thing
It doesn't particularly matter what hobbyists get up to. It matters what's available at scale on the mass market, what's widely deployed, what data is legally permissible to collect on a large scale, and what data is legal to sell.
Law enforcement can't subpoena that which does not exist. The best defense to these sorts of things is often to place legal limits on collection, retention, and sale.
Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.
> Your take is both alarmist and defeatist.
Legal limits on national security agencies are not enforceable due to Five Eyes etc. Allied foreign spies do what American spies don’t. I’m just admitting the political reality of the situation. What you do with that information may be limited, but it’s not a failing on my part that this is the status quo.
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