71–80 of 386 posts
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.
This is not a new take, but I think "the west" is effectively building their own version of China's social credit. It's just distributed among a range of private companies and accessed via subpoena or contract. The fact that the government doesn't operate most of it directly is largely irrelevant to those negatively affected by it and in some ways makes the situation worse (who do you even contact to correct inaccura…
> "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?
I ask, honestly, if anyone else one here is seeing a large influx of intentionally skewing of what the US does and makes it comparable to some terrible policy that China does. It really feels like there are a lot of people with strong Chinese interests mudding the waters of debate by equating the US with China. Feels very much like the Russian disinformation campaigns as Trump as elected except smarter and Chinese oriented.
Steps:
* Allow (and encourage) private sector monopolies to form
* Use its leverage and influence to "encourage" those monopolies to do things which the US government is not allowed to do (examples: censorship, data collection)
The list of First Amendment precedents, for example, with respect to the government is long and detailed. On the other hand, private companies operate under fewer restrictions and can act much more freely.
So if we have a situation where there are a small number of monopolies and they, through personal relationships (marriage), lobbying, and the revolving door have a cozy relationship with the US government, then the government can effectively censor (for example) by more or less declaring "will no one rid me of these turbulent tweets" and have the monopolies jump to comply (or face increased risk of antitrust action for example).
This is a win-win for both: the monopolies avoid antitrust and other unwanted regulation by playing ball, and the government gets to ignore the Bill of Rights by "outsourcing" actions to what are in effect de facto quasi-governmental entities. It's only a loss for the people for whom the Bill of Rights was written to protect.
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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.
>> Unlike private actors, governmental actors are publicly constrained in their actions and representatives of the will of our society. Are you aware of the term 'unelected bureaucrat', and do you know how many of them exist? They are accountable to no one. They continually prove to be significant problems.
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.
However, no one has gone as far as Utah in requiring warrants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
https://www.wired.com/story/utah-digital-privacy-legislation...
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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.
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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.
Because the Government has a strictly limited power: it is subsidiary .
Making transactions (and even paying informants for information) are and should be within the power of the government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragnet_Nation
That is, once data is on the open market (including at dark web) then a gov acquiring it is a click or two away.
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>> 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" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
That's bad, but is not what we're talking about here. Not to mention it was a big scandal and that practice (which was not supported by any law or legal policy) has stopped. The China-style social credit system people worry about is something done on purpose, as designed, out in the open. Can we stop taking isolated incidents and framing them as official policy?
> can we stop taking isolated incidents and framing them as official policy
Which do you actually want? What bad things that might happen because of it, or that list of bad things massively trimmed down to just what the US government publicly sanctions as official policy?
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> 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.
Yes, and also wage garnishment is another thing that is definitely a common thing.