The U.S. Treasury is buying private app data to target and investigate people

If one sees the U.S. constitution and its amendments merely as dated conventions, there is no reason for the IRS and other agencies not to leverage tech to drive enforcement numbers, and for the agencies themselves to just become the policy levers they want to have. However, there are others who believe the rules are in place to prevent this precise type of eventuality, where a technological change shifts the balance of power and shreds any perception of a social contract, so you need rules that limit the scope and powers of government so it doesn't consume and enslave everything.

I think a generation of people who believe the former statement have taken control of institutions, and we're watching it play out now. If you want to predict what this generation of bureaucracy will do, find the emergency exceptions and notwithstanding discretion to every law that protects the individual and limits the power of government, and then contrive the excuse that enables it, and this will be the policy and tactics of the people behind it. This Treasury collecting data story isn't about legalisms and principles, the people doing it really are nihilists, where language itself is just words that can mean anything, so it might as well mean whatever they want. Arguing under the false belief that principles and logic matters means doing nothing while they ratchet up controls and make themselves impossible to dislodge.

You aren't going to persuade the Treasury or other people involved in these plays with reason, as the prospect of total, permanent, tech-facilitated dominion means the stakes are too high for them not to make a play for it. Only the courts, or sadly, conflict can dislodge it I think. We need to seriously consider how much tech is causing our governments to metastasize, and what the options for mitigating it are.

There is no reason to believe your phone that tracks everything about you will not be used by people in government without accountability as leverage against you personally. This was paranoid ranting 20 years ago, and today it's just unpopular buzzkill. All that's left is to say "it was ever thus" and the only people who complained were the ones merely maladapted to the change and the inevitable progress of history.

A good start, but their profiles are probably incredibly well scrubbed (or whatever is out there is already mitigated).

Instead, collect it on every Congressperson and then see how fast things change. Most politicians don't have the means to scrub their backgrounds like multi-million dollar PR-vulnerable CEOs.

The pseudonymised ad data is just going to tell you the numbers of people travelling to sanctioned states. No big deal. There would be a story here if the government was re-identifying people, which would be a clear breach of the law. But there’s no evidence or suggestion of that happening, just “assume the worst of government” speculation. Poor journalism.

As for looking at public social media posts for evidence of tax dodging, I’d hope that if someone was dumb enough to advertise this publicly, and everyone can see they are abusing other citizens out of funding for public services, the IRS should look into it.

From what I've read China's social credit system does not yet incorporate any non-financial information; that part is more aspirational.

It's probably faster to buy data on members of Congress. I assume that's where things likt the Video Privacy Protection Act came from.