If only our society had some orderly process to balance privacy with public safety - such as by having the cops explain to a judge why they need to track a given person, for how long, and so on.
Perhaps also some rules about what counts as a good enough reason, and telling judges they can't grant overly broad, blanket permission.
Someone should put something in the constitution about that.
> One DEA official had told Reuters: "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day. It's decades old, a bedrock concept."
Constitution or not, they're doing it.
[0]: https://theweek.com/speedreads/651668/hundreds-police-office...
They've tried that approach but it's actually less efficient than "good old fashioned police work" because it turns out that 99/100 of your hits are gonna be lawful weirdos, 1/100 is gonna be a petty drug dealer and the career advancing prosecution you actually wanted would have been much easier to find by using normal methods like inferring that a dealer has a supplier, a spy has a handler, etc, etc and trying to suss out who those people are. The NSA figured all this out post 9/11 when they were building data haystacks in search of terrorists.
What the data haystacks do get used for is dragnet policing wherein an agency picks some crime they're gonna go hard on, pulls up a bunch of results of people who probably did it, tosses all the people who are likely to pose any risk to them (e.g. you don't see the ATF knocking on doors asking about Temu glock switches in bad parts of Detroit) and kicks in the doors of whoever's left.
The data haystacks are also really useful for witch hunts when they get egg on their face and need to make someone pay, like that time they prosecuted anyone and everyone who they could construe as having done anything to help the kid who bombed the Boston Marathon, and the January 6 people of whom a great number were certainly just hapless.
And this is in addition to the usual "opposition research" like the FBI bugging MLK and all that sort of crap.
Parallel construction makes the mere existence of these data sets extremely dangerous.
Not being skeptical, but curious
For example: https://marketinginsidergroup.com/marketing-strategy/digital...
This has been a widespread problem for the better part of at least half a decade, likely much more.
They managed to outsource it on accident just because of a shared need with advertisers to target people.
i think most people are on the fence / undecided, and the few that do "pick a side" only do so based on their personal life experiences (which includes family and community influences)
Also, people are influenced by what other people say, especially people in tech. You can see people on HN saying how hopeless it all is. People on HN and your social circle are listening to what you say.
Convenience wins out for the vast majority of people. People just want to be left alone and have nice things. As long as it is just advertisers knowing everything, the masses just won't care. Even if the state starts to take action, as long as it doesn't happen to them, they won't care either.
For some reason, when it comes to other causes, people repeat the obviously false (and hypocritical) right-wing talking point that it's all useless and hopeless.
(Throwing around words like 'wack' and 'preaching' isn't evidence or a stronger argument.)
These are not my words, but words I've been called when droning on and on about the evils of social media and ad tech. <shrug>