Data brokers are gearing up to fight privacy bills | Hacker News Reader

Data brokers are gearing up to fight privacy bills

theverge.com

90 pointsleotravis1015 comments

Section 702 is expiring at the end of the month but whether or not it gets re-authorized by a bill called RISSA is likely going to the floor of the house NEXT WEEK. IF you care about privacy and surveillance, contact your house member and say you want real surveillance and fisa and 702 reform, and that they should only vote for RISSA if three good amendments from the judiciary committee pass, and three bad ammendments from the intellegence committee fail.

The good judiciary ammendments would: requiring fbi obtain a warrant before querying 702 data, close data broker loophole, prohibit restarting "abouts" collection. All good things.

Intel committee ammendments are really bad. expands the definition of Foreign Intelligence Information to include counternarcotics, Unnecessarily expands suspicionless vetting of immigrants, including people allready in in the United States, and Includes one of the biggest expansions of surveillance in recent history, or what Rep. Lofgren calls "Patriot Act 2.0," by expanding the categories of businesses that can be subject to a *gagged directive* under Section 702

This has been an incredibly annoying issue to track and mobilize around because things are moving quickly and behind the scenes but just raising the issue helps. Even if you think your house rep sucks on everything else, its worthwhile to reach out on this issue. Its hard to know where people stand when folks from trump-land and the squad are both calling for reform.

A representative for my state has recently been bragging about her efforts to protect peoples' privacy from such data brokers by requiring them to disclose whether they offer a way to opt-out of your data being used in certain ways, or they will have to pay a fine.

This is far, far below the bar for me, and it makes me question state government's ability to actually protect citizens from data broker spying. This legislation really needs to make any data collection in the first place illegal except on an opt-in basis. None of this, "Oh you can keep collecting the data all you like, but if someone asks you to pretty-please not use it in certain ways, maybe you should pinky-swear that you're going to do that."

When I use a bank card to buy groceries, that should not give anyone license to my e-receipts, full stop. Until that happens I'm going to keep paying with cash at stores that don't use rewards programs.

do they still have prepaid credit cards? that might be an option too if you get annoyed by using cash or dont want to carry it for whatever reason.

United States law has made anonymous prepaid cards illegal.

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/why-am-i-being-aske...

The headline leaves out the fact that law enforcement agencies are gearing up to fight those bills, too. They want to be able to buy information that would be unconstitutional to acquire otherwise.

yeah... a lot of ink has been spilled over there should be a Warrent requirement for the FBI but imo the data broker loophole is the bigger issue. NSA buys netflow data in bulk for petes sake.

Quoted from the article, from the National Sheriffs Association:

“The Sheriffs of this great country don’t often keep score on House amendments,” the letter read, “but on this one, we will keep score and know who our friends are by their votes against Congressman Davidson’s amendment, which empowers the cartels and further erodes the rule of law in our nation.”

Unsubtle, threatening language from a US law enforcement body?

Why do we tolerate behavior from corporations that we would absolutely despise if a person did it?

The whole point of corporations is that they are organized to do things (leaving good or bad out of it) that a person cannot do

But they’re also legally speaking “people” (persons) just to add insult to injury.

> they’re also legally speaking “people” (persons) just to add insult to injury

Yes, collective rights exist.

Hardly, the point is to allow people to take some risks without risking all their assets. That’s it, that’s the entire point when they were created as people had been pooling assets long before corporations exited.

IMO, like bankruptcy laws in general it’s a generally a good idea. Where the nuances exists is what debts can’t be discharged in bankruptcy and at what point you pierce the corporate veil because several things remove the protections offered by creating a company.

One of the things we get wrong IMO is I think a corporation should be unable to shield itself from risk by creating another corporation. That creates all kinds of terrible incentives without any real upside.

> Why do we tolerate behavior from corporations that we would absolutely despise if a person did it?

I don't see how an individual trading these data would be more or less despicable to the parties involved.

Picture a possessive ex peeping through your window with binoculars. Following you everywhere you go. Wiretapping your house. Hacking your accounts to see all your photos. You get the idea

A privacy watchdog really should publish an ad like that, to really drill into the common masses about what corporations do to us.

> Picture a possessive ex peeping through your window with binoculars. Following you everywhere you go. Wiretapping your house.

Except they don't need to do that. I can individually set up an app and spy on users and then aggregate that with other apps and buy and sell the data. That's the problem.

Put the other way: if a corporation hired a private eye to follow you everywehere and physically peep through your windows with binoculars, there would be backlash.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com