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

theintercept.com

41–50 of 386 posts

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

#41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until the US public finds out about the concept of a credit score (new in the 1980s).

Credit score for ghee most part tries to assure lenders you can repay your debts. Social credit score is about how close you hew to proscribed behavior at large.

Credit score can affect employment, I.E. you can't get hired because you are too poor.

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

#42
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I assume the exact opposite. I'm guessing many people oppose government data collection but because they are buying data on the open market from people who "opt in", they're okay with it. I wish there was the ability to make a poll: * This is fine, privacy is dead. * This is okay because of private companies collecting and selling the data, even to the government * This is okay because the government is using…

https://strawpoll.com/a584xf5re

[flagged]

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

#43
post #8

We need a Supreme Court ruling or law that says if the government doesn’t have a warrant to collect your data, they also can’t buy it from third parties. We also need privacy protections so these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.

I absolutely think that the government should be able to purchase data in order to conduct investigations. Unlike private actors, governmental actors are publicly constrained in their actions and representatives of the will of our society.

the subpoena system, for all its failings, is that public constraint. if it can be circumvented, that constraint effectively no longer exists.

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

#44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit score for ghee most part tries to assure lenders you can repay your debts. Social credit score is about how close you hew to proscribed behavior at large.

My understanding was it basically was providing a way to incentivize indigent people to behave the law by imposing penalties for failing to pay fines. In the US, fines are mostly meaningless if you are poor as debtor prisons are (rightfully) illegal.

> In the US, fines are mostly meaningless if you are poor as debtor prisons are (rightfully) illegal.

You're overwhelmingly correct, however someone is going to shortly reply to your comment with a link to a story about how someone somewhere got jailed over a debt and how debtor prisons are making a comeback. It's extraordinarily rare in the US.

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

#45
post #2

I'm curious what the overall take will be on this. Normally, this action would be frowned upon if it was a private company, but I'm assuming that people may be more open to it being done by Treasury because it's "for the societal good".

Imagine the government wanted to know who "deepthroat" was during Watergate: just buy the location data of the journalists and anyone nearby.

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

#46
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "the west" is effectively building their own version of China's social credit. China's social credit system allegedly assigns (or will assign?) all citizens scores and punishes them for social wrongdoings. The IRS has always been tasked with auditing and catching tax cheats, the Treasury always went after people who violate economic sanctions. What's the similarity other than data collection?

Why do you need more similarities? The mass data collection completes the system.

Because we need to understand the purpose of the data collection and what bad things might happen because of it.

If Treasury is using this data to catch people who violate economic sanctions, ok. If the IRS is using this data to catch people who cheat on their taxes, ok. I don't love either of those things, but they are using the data only to do things that have been defined as their job to do for a long time now.

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that any of this data is going to be used to penalize people financially/economically for "social infractions", or to penalize people in unrelated ways (like, you missed payments on your credit card so you aren't allowed to ride on a train). If there was, then sure, that's cause for worry.

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

#47
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a private company can buy the data why shouldn't the government be able to? The real solution is to not allow the data to be sold to anyone.

Private companies (theoretically/ideally) don't have the power of life and death over you

Like literally, the amount of instances where the government is weighing life/death is very small, even smaller at the federal level (most death penalty cases are against state laws). If you're meaning in the 'government programs can greatly affect my quality of life', then private companies can totally do that too - through targeted advertising.

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

#48
It stands to reason that the government won't need a warrant to gather criminally admissible data from a service broker if it is voluntarily transferred to the government and the service broker forced its users to agree to a terms of service agreement.

I also see lots of talk in the comments about a social credit and hiring potential. There are no restrictions on hiring software developers. As horrible as a social credit sounds at least its some kind of guardrails, where now there are none. In any system without constraints there is maximum potential for implicit bias.

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

#49
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Credit score for ghee most part tries to assure lenders you can repay your debts. Social credit score is about how close you hew to proscribed behavior at large.

Credit score can affect employment, I.E. you can't get hired because you are too poor.

Or rent an apartment/house in many cases

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

#50
post #8

We need a Supreme Court ruling or law that says if the government doesn’t have a warrant to collect your data, they also can’t buy it from third parties. We also need privacy protections so these companies wouldn’t exist in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
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