zlacker

>>benwer+(OP)
The government couldn't do it this easily if it wasn't for sale.

It being for sale means anyone can be doing it which might be a framing that would be more alarming to the law-and-order types.

But really you need a two prong solution:

1) restrict this from being collected and compiled in the first place, eliminate the ability to default to this tracking unless someone opts out

2) restrict the government's ability to use or acquire through non-market-based means. The claim here is that there's already restrictions on this vs directly surveiling, but I haven't seen directly which specific restrictions those are for buying off-the-shelf info and the article doesn't specify.

There are very really no companies that I trust to keep my data safe for 10, 20, 50 years. Leadership changes, ownership changes, etc. We have to cut it off at the source.

>>majorm+08
What i don't understand is why if it's illegal and forbidden for the government to directly indiscriminately collect information and data on citizens, they can buy the same information from data brokers without an issue? Surely this violates the intent of the law.

>>mc32+0e
In theory, the data was provided willingly when collected.

If you rent a locker, and the terms of the rental agreement say that the person you're renting from has access to the locker for any reason, then the cops do not need a warrant to ask the lessor to open the locker, only a warrant to coerce the lessor to open the locker.

If the lessor is willing to let anybody take a picture of what is in the locker for $5, then the government doing so isn't abusing its special privilege.

In practice, most people do not understand the ramifications of the things they agreed to that put this data out there (if they even read it!) and in many cases did not have reasonable alternatives to the services that they signed up for.

>>aidenn+Hf
> In practice, most people do not understand the ramifications of the things they agreed to

Going further, it must be clarified that the whole point of doing things this way is that people do not understand it. The people who want to surveil everyone could either do it illegally and get in trouble, or create an inscrutable bureaucratic system that so sufficiently obscures what they are doing that they get the same results along with a legal cover if they are discovered. If we did have privacy laws that prevented this, they would just collect it illegally. This is absolutely not to say that privacy laws are pointless (they would be helpful) but that we must understand this situation not as an accident, but as the slow creation of a class of people who want to exercise power over us and have been getting their way.

>>Taylor+0A
Google founders had some internal compass when they offered GMail "free" with an explicit statement that they would "index the emails" or whatever. I recall smart people, a few of them, noting it but the rush happened. Second was smart phones not being too coy about knowing your phone call records with an ID attached to it, every time, all the time. When the public accepted those two things, in recent memory, that was enough to tip IMHO here in the USA. Whatever legal powers behind the scenes with the Patriot Act were contemporaneous, after GMail.