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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

#311

Post by im3w1l »

downandout wrote: post #157
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.

If SCOTUS outlawed buying the data, they’d just find ways around that too. Maybe they’d just start creating apps and directly monitoring people. With an unlimited marketing and development budget, they could wind up on the majority of Americans’ phones pretty fast. Depending on the kinds of apps they created, they might get warrantless access to millions of bank accounts, text messages, emails, video conferences, ful…

Startup idea: Buy dirt on your enemies and donate it to the treasury - with just a press of a button! Now they aren't buying it anymore so all should be well.

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

#312

Post by jakelazaroff »

Jensson wrote: post #300
jkhdigital wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government purchasing this data is tantamount to a search. There's quite a bit of precedent on this, much of which was needed after telephones became ubiquitous. Just because the electrical signals carrying a private conversation pass through wires that are owned by a third party does not make the conversation public. Similarly, just because internet traffic is observable by anyone with a network tap does not mea…

> Just because the electrical signals carrying a private conversation pass through wires that are owned by a third party does not make the conversation public Without data protection laws that data isn't your private data, that data is the company's data. And you are free to do whatever you want with your data, and since the company owns this data the company can sell it to the government, it doesn't matter if you co…

We have laws, though. The Fourth Amendment is a law, and it's reasonable to say that purchasing what is (arguably) the company's data is still tantamount to a search of our "effects".

Or maybe it's not, and we need new legislation specifically targeting this. That's where the Supreme Court comes in: their raison d'être is to resolve ambiguities in existing law.

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

#313

Post by coralreef »

drusepth wrote: post #233
coralreef wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI needs file hashes of every photo on everyone's phone. It will help detect abusers of cp/illegal content. It is the mandate of the FBI and their job for a long time now to stop those things. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that these hashes would be used to penalize people in other ways, but if there was then sure, that's cause for worry. /parody

The comment says /parody, but I'd happily sacrifice such a small amount of privacy (hashes of the photos of my phone; not even the photos themselves?) to help law enforcement detect abusers of child pornography and related illegal content. The hypothetical "what if" of how those hashes could be used to penalize people in other ways is FUD. We can think of millions of ways to abuse any system -- but that doesn't mean…

> We can think of millions of ways to abuse any system -- but that doesn't mean that people will.

What world do you live in? Did you entirely miss out on the Snowden revelations?

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

#314

Post by boppo1 »

TeeMassive wrote: post #235
literallyaduck wrote: post #165

Don't like it? Organizations like the EFF have been working to stop overreach: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/eff-fincen-stop-pushin... You can help financially, and contact each of your representatives and senators and request they act to stop this end run around the constitution.

Upvote for the EFF. They really are the heroes of digital time. And they stayed true to their mission amidst the woke wave other organizations have been swayed with.

I gave them $100 and about a year later they saved youtube-dl.

Soon as I'm actually making money again, they'll get some.

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

#315

Post by judge2020 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #246

We should be asking why the fuck this is for sale. Why is this okay? I hate this new normal but I look around and nobody cares. Nobody I talk to IRL gives a shit. This is our reality. How do we learn to navigate this strange new post privacy environment?

Why is because Congress has been captured by big corporations and their lobbying money for nearly a century now. Anything pro-consumer that stands to limit the upper bounds of profit (that doesn't literally threaten the collapse of the nation) is just a signal for their corporate donors that they haven't been paid enough that year to keep quiet.

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

#316

Post by judge2020 »

mrobot wrote: post #189

Does anyone know what day Tech Inquiry provided these documents to The Intercept? Seems kinda convenient we get our nice exciting "adversarial" article about this four days /after/ the infrastructure bill passes and we are locked in to have tons of new bank surveillance and like 80,000 new IRS agents...

I imagine they're trying to stagger news, this is one of those articles where it's probably a scoop, but you don't want to have it buried by everything about the infrastructure bill lest nobody see this one.

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

#317

Post by tehjoker »

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.

You really think it's because of activism and not because a lack of personal financial literacy is good for the oligarchs and more time spent teaching other subjects is also good for the oligarchs (employable skills)?

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

#318

Post by LogonType10 »

judge2020 wrote: post #307
vore wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly reasonable for people to want greater privacy in off-the-shelf products they buy. People shouldn't have to resort to buying SIM cards with cash (???) to preserve their privacy.

You can purchase with a debit card to preserve your privacy if you'd like if your debit card is held by an institution that values that sort of thing. But the point of buying SIM cards with cash is to be sure nobody, not even Visa/Mastercard or your bank can tie it back to you. There's a difference between data privacy and having a phone number that isn't linked to your person (besides if someone manually reviews CCT…

Yes, exactly. There are differences between confidentiality, privacy, and anonymity. It's a Venn diagram. Using effective crypto and self-hosted services gets you confidentiality of your data, but not necessarily anonymity if your hardware, accounts, and payments are tied to your name.

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

#319

Post by Jensson »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #312
Jensson wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because the electrical signals carrying a private conversation pass through wires that are owned by a third party does not make the conversation public Without data protection laws that data isn't your private data, that data is the company's data. And you are free to do whatever you want with your data, and since the company owns this data the company can sell it to the government, it doesn't matter if you co…

We have laws, though. The Fourth Amendment is a law, and it's reasonable to say that purchasing what is (arguably) the company's data is still tantamount to a search of our "effects". Or maybe it's not, and we need new legislation specifically targeting this. That's where the Supreme Court comes in: their raison d'être is to resolve ambiguities in existing law.

> The Fourth Amendment is a law, and it's reasonable to say that purchasing what is (arguably) the company's data is still tantamount to a search of our "effects".

Got any precedents for this? All examples given in this thread was about the government forcing companies to hand over data, not companies just plain selling it to the government. These companies are already selling this data to other companies, like credit score companies gets a lot of data from banks, so to them selling it to the government as well is just another buyer. Does the fourth amendment really apply to cases like this? My hunch is that it does not, and you wont find any such cases since it is so clear that it doesn't apply that it hasn't even reached a court.

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

#320

Post by whimsicalism »

jkhdigital wrote: post #286
whimsicalism wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying someone for information != warrantless search. A search involves compulsion.

No, it is more nuanced than that and depends on the nature of the information. Banks hold massive amounts of highly personal information about their customers, and this knowledge is an unavoidable consequence of the business relationship. I think most people would agree that the government needs a warrant to obtain this information, even if the bank was willing to sell it anyway.

> I think most people would agree that the government needs a warrant to obtain this information, even if the bank was willing to sell it anyway.

I don't think it is legal for banks to sell their balance information to other private entities either. But if it were, then I think it would be permissible for the government to be one of the buyers.

Your interpretation of 4A is not backed by any legal precedent.

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