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

theintercept.com

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

#81

Post by mc32 »

mywittyname wrote: post #54
mc32 wrote: 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 scores are used as a proxy for Ideal Citizenship. It just so happens to have baked into it enough plausible deniability as to not run afoul of anti-discrimination laws. Turns out, a lot of "bad" actions result in missed bill payments.

In a semi anonymous society how else do you suppose one should determine the creditworthiness of someone?

It used to be the merchant had to know you and you had to build up your credit with each merchant over time. Credit scoring made it easier for merchants and customers to issue and leverage we credit.

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

#82

Post by david-cako »

nostromo wrote: 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.

Why should dark web data brokers get to look at all of my nudes but not the Supreme Court?

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

#83

Post by mc32 »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #57
michaelbrave wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is this actually true, or is it the case that you can't get financial related jobs because your credit score has been lowered by your past cases of poor handling of money?

The education system utterly fails when it comes to educating students in financial literacy.

They’d much rather teach them activism than actually give them useful tools for evaluating their finances and making good decisions.

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

#84

Post by gred »

AlexandrB wrote: post #9

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…

Has anybody studied or quantified the evolution of "effective liberty" over time in the US? Say you buy groceries once per week. That activity might have triggered 1 governmental control touchpoint in 1800 (sales tax?), but in 2020 it might have triggered many more due to increased automation, logging and third-party delegation. All of this, of course, without fundamental changes to the Law of the Land -- simply because some of the assumptions built into our core restrictions on governmental power no longer hold.

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

#85

Post by bcrosby95 »

boringg wrote: post #72
Sevastopol wrote: post #29

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?

Agree with Sevastopol how is it even similar? 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…

This is a common strategy in American politics. If you can get the public to associate something with China/Russia/communism/bad person then you have the American public on your side. So I wouldn't necessarily see it as just people with strong Chinese interests.

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

#86

Post by mmcdermott »

mywittyname wrote: post #60
nostromo wrote: 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.

We can't rely on SCOTUS to make this ruling for another 50+ years, so our best hope is to start with state legislators. The majority of law enforcement happens at a state level, and most state legislators aren't as hamstrung as the federal one is, so this is the easiest way to achieve the most impactful results. Also, POTUS is in charge of most federal law enforcement agencies. So it might be possible to handle this…

Feels like it would be more airtight to amend the Constitution. Why hope that precedence falls a certain way instead of removing any ambiguity from the law?

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

#88

Post by [deleted] »

quantified wrote: post #27
HWR_14 wrote: 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…

We all committed privacy suicide when we bought smartphones. The data that we thought should be out of government hands, we put into the hands of many businesses. I agree it seems unsettling, but why can’t the government purchase information on the open market?

[deleted]

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

#89

Post by artificialLimbs »

aspenmayer wrote: post #69
artificialLimbs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true, or is it the case that you can't get financial related jobs because your credit score has been lowered by your past cases of poor handling of money?

Failure to navigate a capitalist system of hoop-jumping due to lack of funds causes a self-fulfilling prophesy of poor performance at said hoop-jumping and associated poor credit scores. Blaming the victim comes to mind.

If I only pay my bills on time does my credit score go up in the US? Asking because I don't know, but if that is the case, not sure why you can call it 'hoop jumping'.

I don't care for the credit companies, they're total scum. But I'm not sure how to do anything better.

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

#90

Post by artificialLimbs »

mc32 wrote: post #83
artificialLimbs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this actually true, or is it the case that you can't get financial related jobs because your credit score has been lowered by your past cases of poor handling of money?

The education system utterly fails when it comes to educating students in financial literacy. They’d much rather teach them activism than actually give them useful tools for evaluating their finances and making good decisions.

Absolutely.

This is a great primer for those completely unfamiliar: https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465...

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