Comment by api
6 hours ago
I'm referring to mobile phones, software that constantly spies on you, location tracking, and mass data fusion without any regard for legal limitations or privacy.
Each individual data point seems normal or innocuous, but when you tie them all together and then leverage the tech panopticon you have an insane amount of detail on every person. There are no meaningful legal safeguards on how this data is used, especially when it's laundered through private contractors not subject to much oversight.
When you couple this with increasingly unlimited powers granted to law enforcement agencies, you get a situation where a system could decide you're a threat and some just comes and beats the shit out of you, takes your property, or shoots you, and you have little recourse.
The people cheering for this seem to think it'll never be used against them.
> I'm referring to mobile phones, software that constantly spies on you, location tracking, and mass data fusion without any regard for legal limitations or privacy
None of that is relevant to the article. It’s about HHS data being queried to give ICE probable addresses. What you’re doing is indistinguishable from whataboutism.
I don’t think that’s your intent. But we have an actual abuse of public data at hand here. Going on a tangent about dragnet surveillance is off topic and misleading.
I don't think the two topics are separable. This is a specific case of the general trend.
> don't think the two topics are separable. This is a specific case of the general trend
They are and should be separable. DHS hoovering up government data is orthogonal to private data collection. They could become related. But they aren’t, and muddling a hypothetical problem with a clear, present and actual one is a good way to normalize the latter.
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