Can anyone explain why people choose to use internet providers that sell their data? Do they get internet for free?
most commercial isp's do this
In the US you mean, where I live this is nether legal nor common.
NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
61–70 of 104 posts
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#62I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…
You're talking about police, but the NSA has a charter and in that charter is supposed to (for SIGINT : signals intelligence, i.e., gathering) be doing signals gathering outside the US on at least one end of conversations. Perhaps something changed over the last 20 years. But perhaps the rule still applies (or is supposed to apply) and that's the implied misbehavior.
Regardless of their formal categorization, they're a subset of "cop", which means they're not held accountable for misbehavior.
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#63I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…
I think this gets down to a fundamental problem with tech that society is ignoring like a pink elephant in the room. Society fundamentally changed with the introduction of computers. Things have become possible that were never possible before. This is obvious if you consider the tech of 1900, 1950, and today. The elephant in the room is that the more complete the dataset the more dangerous it is. Its like gunpowder.…
Also, it appears that a lot of the danger is political. Both Trump and Biden were presumably being spied on by the incumbent administration (Trump because of the Russia thing, Biden because of the Ukraine thing). It seems likely that Trump is being spied on again, and there is no reason to believe this pattern is going to stop.
The hazing process for electing a president is already cruel enough that nobody sane runs. Add in the risk of the incumbent administration finding a way to leak all your dirty laundry from as far back as the records go and it will be really weird. Probably corrupt, ugly and with bad results for everyone outside the intelligence apparatus.
In some sense that isn't new, there are questionmarks over the US spooks dating back to J. Edgar Hoover. But the damage that sort of actor can do is greater the more data they have to make decisions with.
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#64Many threat intelligence companies buy that data and then resell it as a service. I'm not very clear as to how accessing that data in the first place is legal...
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#65It seems like the problem is that the information is for sale at all. I generally think warrants should be needed when police (or i guess spies) do something that an ordinary citizen wouldn't be allowed to do. If the info is available for purchase by anyone, then i don't think warrants should be needed.
one step further: the problem is the existence of the data as in, pii should be a massive liability and everyone should be incentivized to avoid collecting it
I’ve got news, lots of fellow HN readers support this data collection through jobs called the ad / marketing industry.
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#66I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…
Well, yes. American discourse has got backed into this corner:
- "the government" (broadly defined) is not supposed to be able to spy on people
- there is no general privacy law, only narrowly defined bits for e.g. video rental records and libraries
- corporations spying on people is completely normalized
- reporting the results of your spying to other people is free speech
> If there is no law against the proprietor bundling up his customer data and selling it, it doesn't seem like there is a strong legal case against police using it.
So long as there's a strong "corporations good, government bad" faction this is going to continue to be a problem.
(Weirdly, the "government bad" faction don't seem to be concerned with police accountability at all, except in very narrow cases where one of their own is arrested for blatent crimes)
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#67For the level of surveillance taking place, I want a lot less crime.
Be careful what you wish for, because you wont just get less crime but less deviant behavior.
We are borg.
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#68I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…
> a MUCH bigger problem on the internet than in real life
THIS, sadly. And a large-enough quantitative difference becomes a serious qualitative difference.
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#69I'm trying to think through this from a legal perspective. If I'm going from store-to-store around town, my understanding is that police are allowed to watch me and even go into the businesses and ask questions or pull security footage without a warrant. The information they gather is circumstantial and probably would not hold up in court, but they can use it as grounds to get a warrant. Let's imagine a different cas…
Well, yes. American discourse has got backed into this corner: - "the government" (broadly defined) is not supposed to be able to spy on people - there is no general privacy law, only narrowly defined bits for e.g. video rental records and libraries - corporations spying on people is completely normalized - reporting the results of your spying to other people is free speech > If there is no law against the proprietor…
Technically, if we'd consider corporations part of the government (which we arguably should; many acts of regulation that would be impractical to implement directly through the government are farmed out as the responsibility of corporations as a pre-req of doing business), many surveillance capitalism patterns would become fraught by default.
The "corporations aren't government entities" defies logic. As without government recognition, they aren't even a thing.
Re: NSA Buys Americans' Internet Data Without Warrants, Unclassified Letter Says
#70It seems like the problem is that the information is for sale at all. I generally think warrants should be needed when police (or i guess spies) do something that an ordinary citizen wouldn't be allowed to do. If the info is available for purchase by anyone, then i don't think warrants should be needed.
one step further: the problem is the existence of the data as in, pii should be a massive liability and everyone should be incentivized to avoid collecting it
Making it illegal to sell would go a long way in that direction.