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Comment by wangchungtonite | Hacker News Reader

The stasi exists now. When east Germany fell all citizens could walk into their equivalent of the pentagon and look up their file. They had files on almost everyone. This was 1989. Imagine what you could look up on yourself today if the governments fell.

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Although I'm sure that the NSA do their best, I would bet that Facebook and Google have a much more accurate profile. Not sure if there is a point in making this distinction, though.

Precisely, when it comes to public companies and government entities, lines can blur and governments do have a track record of introducing laws and regulations to enable access.

Another way of thinking about it is - if the NSA wanted coca-cola's or KFC's secret recipe; They would already have it.

But social media as a whole, is for governmental security services, the greatest invention they never made.

That's likely a large party of why the NSA prioritized gaining access to their data through various programs, some of which have been exposed over the years. And when you're talking about nation states, even minor Hail Mary efforts have access to extensive resources sufficient to represent an entirely new sort of threat model to those companies. I doubt anyone at Google was worried about the risk of the NSA digging up their private fiber cables in the middle of nowhere with a backhoe to tap their internal communications prior to revelations about the program.

In the US you can send a FOIA request for your FBI file:

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/jun/21/foia-how-...

Someone said their friend did that and got back a single sheet of paper with the words "An artist of no repute"

For an artist, this might ironically be the most damning thing they could receive.

That would make an excellent title for a book for film: "An Artist Of No Repute".

Not sure about now but used to be 99% of Americans had no FBI file. But if you asked for your file they would have to create one.

My bank knows a huge amount about my finances, addresses, purchase history of almost everything and I'm sure lots else.

I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.

>I guess what matters is what data holders do with it.

If only that was what mattered. What also matters is what they're going to do with it in the future, along with what the people they're going to give it to will do with it, and what the people who steal it will do with it. (Not to mention what they're doing with it right now but not telling you).

My personal theory is that because injuries tend to heal eventually and also because they tend to physically hurt, people have a psychological tendency to underestimate the infinite future and also to underestimate anything that doesn't immediately result in physical pain.

Not so much "walk into" as "storm", and not so much "look up" as "dig out of the shred/burn pile". There's a fascinating bit of tech history in the attempts to reconstruct shredded files.

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