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Comment by 0x008 | Hacker News Reader

We all kind of know this is true, but it’s always really eyeopening to see to what extent these companies know everything about us.

Even worse is, I think, that somehow they are allowed to sell all the data and that you can basically buy data about everybody easily online[1]

[1]: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-databroker-files-wie-uns-apps-un...

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> We all kind of know this is true, but it’s always really eyeopening to see to what extent these companies know everything about us.

I agree, if you have a Spotify account I implore you ( and anyone reading ) to download their Spotify data [1] and just look through it, it’s really interesting. I hear news about how big companies are collecting all our data and got kinda desensitized to just the news but to see it applied to you and your specific music experience is pretty eye (re-)opening.

1. https://support.spotify.com/us/article/data-rights-and-priva...

Could you elaborate a little further ( maybe not data itself, but its type and so on )? I don't have Spotify, but I am obviously fairly interested in the subject as a whole ( and that business model spread widely ).

Thanks! Giving it a try. I've been using Google's take out to download my Fitbit data already because the app is so shit these days. I wonder what else has these data dumps available.

Ah there was a great talk at CCC (actually 2) about a guy tracking Germany’s politicians, they deducted crazy relations from publicly available data iirc. I cannot find the talk right now sadly. Was it in German?

Going after the politicians is the only fix for surveillance capitalism. The US's only strong privacy law for consumer activity is for video rentals and came about when the disclosure of rental records for judge Bork scared members of Congress into protecting their own privacy. This still applies to modern day streaming services.

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