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LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

theintercept.com

81–90 of 117 posts

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#81
post #71
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very rare for a crime to be truly unsolvable. For the vast majority it's all about the amount of time and effort the authorities want to put in. License plate readers or not, if your local PD and the DA's office have decided to deprioritize auto thefts then there's nothing you can do about it.

I don't know why this is downvoted. In the car community, you hear TONS of stories about stolen cars. The owners have tracking devices, video with clear shots of the people stealing it with their faces, location of the car, plates of the getaway car, and every piece of evidence handed to them on a silver platter. And the cops never do anything.

Eh, when cops do nothing make it public information yourself.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#82

It's funny, because growing up I thought LexisNexis were just one of those guys I'd use to find academic articles from the school library system, like JSTOR. Then I got employed by the collections industry straight out of college and found out what skiptracing is. There used to be quite a few skiptracing vendors: Accurint, Banko, FastData, to name a few. LexisNexis bought all of them. I imagine that the dossier they…

> I imagine that the dossier they have on the average person dwarfs what the credit bureaus have.

It does. LexisNexis and Equifax [used to be, maybe still are] the first two calls the US Marshals make when setting out to find a fugitive.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#83

ALPR Automatic License Plate Readers are a significant portion of this article, and they raise a lot of questions in my mind. If the police have access to realtime info on the location of all vehicles, how is auto theft still a thing? How are gangs stealing $100k worth of tools from hardware stores and driving away scott free? Are we just at a time before wide use of the data ALPRs provide?

Maybe the stolen cars are taken to a chop shop or ditched before the owner even realizes it has been stolen.

I'm not too familiar with trends in auto theft, but do know around coastal areas your stolen car (truck, usually) goes straight into a shipping container. Thieves do not stop to fuck with swapping plates or any of that Hollywood stuff, they do not care about every ALPR camera in the city watching them drive it across town-- this isn't CSI, nobody's watching those cameras and readying the chopper. That vehicle is getting shipped off to the South Pacific as fast as possible, long before anybody can be bothered to get a warrant to search a foreign container ship for a random container among thousands that might contain a stolen late-model Tacoma.

Same with those recycle-your-phone kiosks in the mall. You can find-my-stolen-iPhone all the way to it, but the vendor empties the tray and ships the collected phones to a parts shop in Brazil every night, before the cops can get a warrant to open it themselves.

Crime pays when you think globally.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#84

It's pretty crazy that our legislators and courts haven't addressed this loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to buy data that they can't legally collect. This essentially nullifies the fourth amendment.

> This essentially nullifies the fourth amendment. Courts seem to think that this information does not have an expectation of privacy since the user gave it away.

The courts seem to place little to no value on privacy.

Within simple interaction I agree, but disagree when it comes to aggregate data. Maybe I tell Amazon some info, Wayfair different info, and Vitacost something else. A 3rd party can aggregate that into a new superset that I didn't give anyone explicitly. This goes well-beyond in-store surveillance and expands potentially and in-reality to full-time surveillance: when your smart thermostat senses you are home, when your car is moving, etc.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#85
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This essentially nullifies the fourth amendment. Courts seem to think that this information does not have an expectation of privacy since the user gave it away.

The courts seem to place little to no value on privacy. Within simple interaction I agree, but disagree when it comes to aggregate data. Maybe I tell Amazon some info, Wayfair different info, and Vitacost something else. A 3rd party can aggregate that into a new superset that I didn't give anyone explicitly. This goes well-beyond in-store surveillance and expands potentially and in-reality to full-time surveillance:…

Someone needs to go into a court room and demonstrate to the judge and/or jury that their personal data is available for sale.

Then ask them if they expected that data to be private.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#86
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you read that about Epstein and Gates?

Forbes, Guardian.. pretty widely reported on last month.

The stories I read say that Epstein attempted to extort Gates but was ignored.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#87
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FBI and CIA are newspaper readers in this analogy.

It's a newspaper that isn't affordable to the majority of the public, doesn't do any advertising to the public, nor does the public even know about it. Not a great analogy really.

Actually it is affordable to the majority of the public. It’s quite cheap to buy a dossier on a person, like $5-25.

If LN allowed it, the general public could afford to run as much as they like.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#88

It's pretty crazy that our legislators and courts haven't addressed this loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to buy data that they can't legally collect. This essentially nullifies the fourth amendment.

idlewords said a long time ago that "If the data is gathered at all, the government can get to it; whether it is on private or public servers is an irrelevant implementation detail. The only way to keep data out of government hands is to not collect it". Nobody wanted to listen to this because taking it seriously would mean tearing down large portions of the ad infrastructure that keeps the tech industry humming. But…

Who is idlewords?

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#89

I was flagrantly misidentified by Lexis Nexis and subsequently a recipient of a pittance resulting from a class action lawsuit many years later. I had to pay for and live out of hotels for several weeks due to their background check connecting me to a person from a state I had never lived in with a middle name and middle initial that was not even same. The most dystopian part of this is that they aren’t good at the s…

One of those salary check services they run has me working as a Civil Engineer in upstate New York, while I was in high school.

Re: LexisNexis is selling personal data to ICE so it can try to predict crimes

#90
post #74

If you're in California you can opt-out of all sale of your personal data on LexisNexus here: https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/request#california In theory, it's a one-step process, though we'll see. Also if you request information they send it to you over snail-mail.

Previous poster stated:

This is likely largely useless unless they have significant private sources of data. Publicly available data is exempt from deletion.

https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#heading5d

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