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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

What kind of job would you realistically take this data to? What company would even so much as look at data procured in this manor. I can think of one that's evil enough and probably have the protection of the US government, but it's not like they could acquire the data directly, if it was necessary.

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If I had to make a wild guess, xAI. The article states they took a job at a government contractor.

It’s interesting (horrifying) to think of the implications actually. People wouldn’t buy this data directly, it’s too obviously illegally procured. But laundered through an LLM to provide “insights” without citation? That’s plausible deniability.

Also meta or any other data broker.

In addition to all the other answers here, foreign governments would fall over themselves to get this kind of data.

My understanding is stats canada gets offered a lot of money for this data after being anonymized. A lot of employers might not ask questions if someone had really good data they could use to help market their product. Especially politically aligned think tanks

Maybe not under the current administration, but that's the kind of risk that could kill your company, if you got caught. It might be why I'm not rich, but that seems like a massively irresponsible risk to take.

Ad Tech, I would bet its ad tech.

If this goes within the Ad Tech industry and knowing how Ad tech industry is, I don't feel quite surprised if we might see foreign adversarial nation buying the Social Security data from Ad tech/ (this Doge person in general either directly or through multiple layers) even in secretive manner at this point.

Either way this data is definitely going to spread behind closed doors.

Nobody in Ad Tech is going to risk jailtime for a slightly higher CPM.

I think you are more correct than you realize

I disagree - it's 100% a factor of how much money you have to pay in legal fees.

Zuck would be happy to take that data, and because he's worth a cool $350 billion, he'll do whatever the fuck he wants with that data, and we'll thank him by cutting his taxes.

You think Donald Trump would put him in jail?

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Nobody wants to fuck with PII, platforms will blackball you in a second if they think you have sensitive data. If you haven't worked in adtech, be quiet and do even the most trivial research before spouting nonsense.

> If you haven't worked in adtech, be quiet and do even the most trivial research before spouting nonsense.

if you have, i won't take ethically-compromised advice from you.

You can’t just donate these tables to the Republican Party; they’re evidence. You need to repack them for deniability. These will be used to cross-check if voters can be ruled vaguely ineligible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

"What kind of job would you realistically take this data to?"

Banks

Sales/Marketing

Healthcare

Palantir

xAI

Any social security scammers

Etc.

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