Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

From a civil liberties perspective, government agencies interested in investigating someone can simply buy location data from marketing companies to build a pattern of life or construct a social graph of a target, all without a warrant and without needing to answer anything via FOIA since the data was collected and processed by a non-government data broker. The FBI spends millions of dollars a year buying location info about people from the cellular companies and data brokers... this isn't an edge case.

View on HN

Dont even need to buy data anymore. Just contract a company already doing this.

https://www.babelstreet.com/

Do you know if foreign governments and corporations are able to purchase this data?

Sure. No restrictions and I don’t see why there should be — why would some random company in the US be assumed to be any more trustworthy than a company not in the US?

There should be greater restrictions on info release and racking by US companies, but those restrictions should protect against all antagonists (corps, governments) both foreign and domestic. However there seems to be little impetus for protection at the moment outside some minor efforts in california.

Short answer, yes. The concept of "foreign governments" is very US-centric. This tracking is not a US-only concept and the connection of these data points is already being used in non-US markets by companies which cross these boundaries. The only differences with each market is the number of signals available for capture. For example one party operating in the US is capturing DNS activity while in Brazil they are capturing telecom data.

So Vladimir Putin can track all US and EU politicians? Surely they might be interested if someone explained it to them in a way they could understand. Are there any limitations on what countries can acquire the data?

I worked at a isp back in the early 00s and we not only sold logged customer data but we would charge (separately) for the gov to colo a machine and get a span port.

"... from the cellular companies..."

If it's cell tower location data, then a warrant may be required.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-402_h315.pdf

Once we have neural sims crime fighting would be so much better. It will be like Minority report but in reverse.

Imagine if someone like Hitler came to power again and decided to exterminate people of certain ethnicity or political interests. He or she could just order or seize a data dump from all those companies and have everyone ready to be rounded up. During the WWII Germans would seize church records and censuses from government buildings to easily find people to arrest and dispose of. Today he or she would have an app for that...

Oh yeah, he'd totally do that, not just look at the Census responses that require you to answer race per address.

You could tell someone's ethnicity from their surname with great accuracy. Not that they particularly cared who will go to a camp...

A state can always gather info like that if it wants to via physical force so A rise to power would have no obvoius advantage today I believe.

The new thing is slimy multinationals like Facebook and worse doing it with almost no responsibility or insight what so ever.

I think "the next Hitler" would in fact use this data to come to power, much less use it to retain power.

I think just as likely, governments use this information to try to elicit responses to various stimuli. They treat voters as consumers and consumers as animals that they can train to react via various kinds of repetition and rewards. More granular data allows them to be more precise in these marketing and behavioral manipulation methods.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com