#Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American #surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.
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Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are #CreditReporting bureaux and #DataBrokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.
Remember #Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?
It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the #RetailCreditCompany, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:
As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:
There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like #Google and #Meta, who are some of their best customers.
As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination - the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.
And now for some good news. The #CFPB, under the leadership of #RohitChopra, has declared war on this alliance:
They've proposed new rules limiting trade between brokers and bureaux under the #FairCreditReportingAct, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between them:
As @KarlBode writes for #Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about #Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the #Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data - it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.
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The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best #Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:
Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't - or shouldn't - use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:
Cops and spies love to raid surveillance industriy dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:
These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side.
Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true #DeepState) and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.
Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:
It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data - does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure - say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?
But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist.
Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.
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