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U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

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Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#111

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

Sometimes the US perspective of things is completely surreal for me as a European. In a country where you can buy assault rifles with minimal background checks, people worry about addresses being available because someone might be able to look up the address to kill them with a drone and a home made bomb.

It’s hilarious and excruciating for many Americans too.

Source: get me out of here

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#112
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debt does not stop you from leaving, if you have a second passport.

US is one of the only countries in the world where you still have to pay US taxes no matter where you live or work and what passports you have, as long as you are a US citizen, and you can't give up US citizenship, which is also a paid process, unless you've paid all taxes.

1. Only on income over $120,000 (it's inflation indexed), so it doesn't matter for the OP.

2. The US does not collect, if you don't want to come back to the US it doesn't matter.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

not necessarily gun shows of course, that's just where it's easy to find private sellers - private sales don't require background checks

Depending on the state yeah

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#114

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

Completely agree. Personal information should be a liability to corporations. It should actively cost them money to know anything at all about us. They should be scrambling to forget all they can the second we're done transacting with them.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why hasn't that happened yet? Also, the government is going to continue indefinitely printing money whether or not we have social security.

It has, inflation is rising rapidly in no small part due to the gov printing money to cover its obligations, of which social security is one of the largest and will only become larger as the cost of living increases due to said inflation- a vicious cycle. If contributions don't cover the payouts (which they don't, and never will unless you tax the younger generations to death) then the difference has to be made up wi…

> inflation is rising rapidly in no small part due to the gov printing money to cover its obligations

“US Inflation Rate is at 3.70%, compared to 3.67% last month and 8.20% last year. This is higher than the long term average of 3.28%.”

I would hardly call something that’s only slightly above average (and less than half of what it was a year ago) as “rising rapidly“.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_inflation_rate

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#116
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the US perspective of things is completely surreal for me as a European. In a country where you can buy assault rifles with minimal background checks, people worry about addresses being available because someone might be able to look up the address to kill them with a drone and a home made bomb.

As a European who has been living in the US for a decade, yeah, you're pretty spot on. Americans are a scared people, probably the most scared I've ever seen. Afraid of the gov't, the neighbors, and random people they don't even know. I've gotten a ton of hate as a foreigner and I am not surprised a hateful, greedy and selfish population like here is afraid somebody will take them out with an improvised device.

> Afraid of the gov't

They should be. As should you.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#117
post #81

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

Changing posession of personal user data from a financial asset to a liability is probably the most effective thing the government could do in the near term to protect people's information. Companies right now are incentivized to collect tons of personal data because it's worth real money to them and others, and the liabilities mostly fall to the users. If there were heavy financial consequences to leaking personal d…

Imho, the test should be "Is targeted advertising barely profitable?"

It should cost enough to retain personal data that, unless that's your primary business and you're very good at it, it doesn't make financial sense.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#118
post #70

On Linkedin there's all kinds of "Top Secret/Security Clearance" groups which lists all the members in that group. Some have 5 thousand people. Sure, some of those users don't actually have clearance at all, but many actually do, and work at firms all doing contracting for the federal government. Call me crazy, but giving out a list of people with clearance to the highest levels of secrets, usually doing tech work, i…

I'm not going to call you crazy but the opposite policy - trying to keep these secret would definitely be crazy. It would be impractical, ineffective and at odds with all sorts of notions of an open, democratic society.

Not mentioning something Vs. putting it on blast online are two ends of a spectrum of common sense when you have access to privileged information that others are willing to kill, in extreme cases, to obtain. This is the only time I can think of where security through obscurity actually can have an impact on your life, and the lives of those around you.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#119
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US is one of the only countries in the world where you still have to pay US taxes no matter where you live or work and what passports you have, as long as you are a US citizen, and you can't give up US citizenship, which is also a paid process, unless you've paid all taxes.

1. Only on income over $120,000 (it's inflation indexed), so it doesn't matter for the OP. 2. The US does not collect, if you don't want to come back to the US it doesn't matter.

The US extends its power over financial institutions whenever it wants, so anyone who leaves the US without renouncing and then can't renounce due to incompliance is likely to end up unbanked eventually.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#120

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

> Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Driveby shootings are super easy. Drone bombing someone is way harder. Especially from 20 miles away. I don't see how Ukraine would change that. Getting away with driveby shooting requires about the same amount of faff as getting away with a drone murder. (Because in both cases u…

https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/us-surveillance...

It's gotten a lot harder to drive off into the sunset when there are massive CCTV networks.

Drone physically distances the operator from the crime.

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