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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

The only problem with "data mining" is the government, not corporations. The corporations use that data to only do one single thing: give you personalised ads.

However the government could pass new laws and prosecute you for things you have done 20 years ago on the internet.

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That's a particular viewpoint that isn't shared by, for example, Europe, where my data is mine, and a corporation gets to use it with my permission. They need to tell me that they gather it, and why they gather it, and what they do with it, and they have to only keep it for as long as necessary.

There are protections for me if a corporation sells my data without my permission or misuses my data.

Is there something stopping these corporations to do anything else with the data? I can imagine recruiters willing to pay on some educational information/analysis. I can also imagine corporations selling credit rating information based on the data on the individuals they have. And these were after thinking about 25 seconds of possible valuable use cases on data.

Have you missed out on the past few years of news?

Facebook has admitted to having manipulated which articles showed up in your news stream, and in which order, to test if they could manipulate the mood of their users.

There was even a discussion about it on here.

You draw a clean divide but be wary of things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism

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