ICE Appears to Be Buying Immigrants' Tax Identifiers from a Data Broker
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1) You have to declare all income, even from illegal activities.
2) The declarations can be used against you in court (IIUIC with the caveat that they need an independent reason to get a warrant for those tax records).
https://epic.org/issues/consumer-privacy/data-brokers/
Consumers are the product.
When the government buys a piece of steel, a chunk of that is property taxes of the owner of the factory building, a huge chunk of that is business taxes, a huge chunk of that is income taxes of the workers that work there.
If the government can own that infrastructure as a fully nonprofit entity that pays zero taxes, the government can buy the steel for $50 instead of $100. That means our income taxes can also be much lower, because the government can be more efficient.
Right now a huge chunk of the taxes you pay to the government go toward paying second-order taxes.
And the property, business and income taxes still need to get paid.
> And the property, business and income taxes still need to get paid.
Not if the government owns it and they decide it's tax exempt. They can also build it on government land, and decide that government land is property tax free.
And also lose $50 of tax revenue. I do not see how the government is any better off here.
SCOTUS determined that merely having a cellphone, which is a modern necessity, creates too much privately held data that the telcos shouldn't be allowed, even when they want to, to hand it over to the government without a warrant.
Basically all we have to do is expand the types of data that land in this zone.
No one voted for it but here we are. Flock on every strategic corner.
Once collected why would a data broker want to purge your record?
There is no escape.
Yea sure. If it helps you sleep better. It is the law.
In reality the data is already 'grey market' so I doubt the law matters to them.
Disappear and new data broker sets up shop. You think these people are regulated? I bet they swap datasets like Pokemon.
There's probably even more than these, but here are some from the video: Healthcare data brokers, fraud data brokers, financial data brokers, marketing data brokers, people search data brokers.
Good video explaining the situation with data brokers and the removal services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA
It's a paid service, they track data brokers datasets (I assume they just act as a buyer for as many as they can) and then manually request your removal from all of them, and then aggressively follow up and chase it for you. Interesting business model, even if it's annoying that the world means you need it.
"Aggressively follow up" is a completely meaningless phrase. It could just mean they put an "angry face" emoji in their email. You might disagree, but courts would likely judge it an irrelevant phrase.
In short: there's No Way to scrub yourself off the web, and no one who wants to abuse information that should remain private will ever respect a take-down request, without the menace of fines and prison.
That said - it is their business, they're broadly well reviewed, and they're clearly incentivised to give scrubbing your data out a good go.
More generally, if you're in a jurisdiction with GDPR-like rules (which is a lot of the world nowadays) the brokers themselves have formal policies & tools for removing your data and chasing people manually myself occasionally I've found it quite effective.
You're certainly not going to get anything removed from any three-letter agencies or purely malicious people. Most of the discussion here though is around data brokers, who are generally large serious businesses who will at least follow the letter of the law. You've got pretty good odds of getting your data removed from any non-trivial businesses, if you follow their carefully hidden data collection policy links and then quote your local legislation and their privacy team in a polite but firm (and repetitive) way.
https://nooneshappy.com/article/data-brokers-unregulated-for...