US companies are selling your personal data to the government!

opinion

by Byron Tau

US spies and police officers are siphoning vast amounts of data about Americans from data brokers. This trend puts us on a dangerous path that authoritarian regimes such as China have already taken.

In the United States, the government’s power is constrained and civil liberties are guaranteed by limiting the amount of information that citizens provide to the state. Police would need a warrant to install a GPS device in her car or tap her phone. Intelligence agencies and military units are prohibited from targeting Americans for surveillance and are supposed to focus their attention overseas.

America is built on the idea that it is dangerous for a nation to have too much power and information. We want police to solve murders and national security agencies to keep us safe, but we don’t want their powers to be all-encompassing or panoptic. I don’t want to. We recognize that humans are flawed and that power corrupts. As a result, there are checks and balances, independent courts, and strict limits on government power.

That is America’s basic social contract: the delicate balance between public safety and individual liberty. But today, that social contract is changing before our eyes, thanks to the vast amounts of data that American companies collect and sell.

Currently, police do not need a warrant to track Americans’ movements through their cellphones or cars. Intelligence agencies can access US internet browsing data without actually hacking anything.

And governments can listen in on the conversations billions of people have on social media. They’re just buying it from a shadowy industry of data brokers that have sprung up to collect information on everyone.

The apps you install on your phone collect a large amount of behavioral information about you. The websites you visit track your movements and the search queries that led you there. Those little banner ads on every app and website collect all kinds of information about you and your device.

It then feeds the information it collects into a mind-bogglingly complex system where tens of thousands of advertisers have access to detailed information about you. Social media sites are full of fake accounts. What data brokers have planted there is to be able to extract and resell the information that people are saying online.

The market for all this data is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. These data brokers with government contracts range from giants like LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters to obscure vendors with names like Babel Street and SafeGraph.

Many of these companies claim that the data they sell is “anonymized” or does not include personally identifiable information such as names, phone numbers, or email addresses. However, datasets like geolocation cannot be anonymized.You’re probably the only one who wakes up every morning your I’m going home your office. Your patterns and habits give you.

Do you think this is an exaggerated concern? I once persuaded a data broker to provide me with data on the movement patterns of American troops in Syria. It was easy to see where they deployed, how they got there, and where they returned to after the tour was over.

All of this poses a significant threat to privacy and civil liberties for Americans at home. The Biden administration knows this — which is why last month it banned countries of concern like China and Russia from accessing data on Americans.

But what they are resisting is limiting the ability of U.S. government agencies to obtain this data. Everyone from top intelligence agencies to local police departments now have vast amounts of information about American citizens. And since they are buying it just like any other customer, this is all considered legal.

There is a bipartisan proposal in Congress authored by Democrat Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Republican Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). This would prevent federal, state, and local government agencies from purchasing data about Americans. The Biden administration opposes this.

America is not China. China is a one-party state that has used technology for social control purposes. In regions like Xinjiang, surveillance is being deployed against oppressed minorities that the Chinese government aims to eradicate.

America is a functioning democracy. We have the rule of law. We have an independent court. But with so much data on the market, the country’s sacred social transactions are in jeopardy.

Byron Tau said,Means of Control: How a Hidden Alliance between Technology and Government is Creating America’s New Surveillance State‘ was released on February 27th.