It seems to me that the government accessing, even if by purchase, information of citizens without probable cause is a violation, if not in letter, then in spirit, of the fourth amendment. I’d like to see an amendment to the Constitution to update the fourth amendment for the modern era, where a huge amount of information can be gathered about people without “searches and seizures”. The general issue of data collection is obviously one of the largest of our time, but I think most people would agree our own government should not be using our money (or debt) to legally circumvent our rights.
Although in my opinion, the vast majority of this data collection and use absolutely counts as "searches and seizures" -- just by private corporations rather than the government. Which, in my view, is worse than if it were just the government.
I think there needs to be some kind of "responsible and clear disclosure" laws that require companies to very clearly and overtly disclose what data they're collecting and how they're using it.
Some kind of standardized "label" (something like the standardized nutritional facts on food products) that is easy for consumers to read and comprehend, not buried in pages of paperwork, without needing to read a 20 page TOS / Privacy Policy.
The legal problem is everyone is "consenting" to data collection by accepting a TOS which protects companies and makes it "legally acceptable". The real problem that needs solving is consumers are rarely aware of what they're consenting to. Companies might not hoover up and sell as much data if they were required to clearly tell everyone they're doing it.
Basically, let's get rid of this idea that agreeing to a 20 page TOS / Privacy Policy is legally binding when < 1% of people actually read what they're agreeing to.
I honestly don’t think this would work. The number of “well why should I care if they have the data” conversations I’ve had is just depressing.
We can't force people to care about privacy. That's not the goal. If someone is clearly informed and they still don't care, that's totally fine. The problem is people aren't being clearly informed.
No, the problem is that they don't really have an alternative. To give none of your information to banks, email providers, ISPs, cell service providers, etc. is to remove yourself from society.
I’m not sure of your personal skills, abilities, and background, so this is more of a general call to action: Why not create an alternative?
I’ve often heard people talk of a lack of alternatives to certain services, so they use them begrudgingly, or boycott them at large personal cost. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is nothing that I’m aware of that says banks or digital service providers need to collect any more information than is necessary to provide the service they offer. It seems to me that, at least in a this niche community there is a desire for privacy-respecting products and services. A company that oriented itself around meeting that demand would be, I suspect, very lucrative.
And what about all the information that is necessary to provide the service they offer, like the real-time location of everyone's cell phone and who calls who when and for how long or all the DNS requests? Sure, a company doesn't have to retain this information and market it for resale, but providing these sorts of services necessarily entails access to a lot of information that most people would consider private, but which the third party doctrine says isn't.
In situations where there isn't an alternative, consent is impossible.
Companies, courts, and for the most part the congress, obviously don't seem to care. (In the USA, at least. Europe sort of seems to care but even then I'm not sure the solutions have been adequate / appropriate)
This is the key right here. There should be a clear way to withhold consent because implicit agreement isn't good enough for the kind of data collection and aggregation that is happening.
Let's be honest here, how many people are "clearly informed?" That's fuzzy definition. I'll give a personal example here[0]. Certainly the implications here are operating through fairly abstract and indirect mechanisms (it's even called "metadata") and most people are not trained to operate within these types of frameworks.
FWIW, no one seems happy with the situation but feel that they have no choice in the matter. It's said that you can choose not to use said service, but often the implication of that means no phone, no internet, no computer (at least non-linux), no bank, etc. There may be a literal choice available, but not a reasonable choice. I think we need to have a clear distinction between these two, because the literal choice is often used to justify something that would have major impacts. I think it is difficult to argue that one could create a reasonable and relatively average modern life with no access to phone, internet, or computer. It also then clearly becomes "well I'm forced to share with x people, so I guess I'll share with y" and often x is "the government" (even if it isn't).
[0] I've on several occasions had conversations with my family where they've been convinced that their phone is listening to every conversation they have (this dates back to 2010 btw but continues today) because they were served ads for something they were talking to about with a friend, in person. They are convinced that is the only way that such an inference could be made rather than through knowledge that the friend made the purchase (recently), that the companies know these two people are standing right next to one another for an extended period of time, and have a decent knowledge of their interests to infer that this product would be likely discussed by these two people. Ironically the recording is more complex, but it appears simpler. Sure, setting is different in 2023+ but we know the compute costs to process every conversation and energy requirements to be always recording and that this would kill phones of the 2010's.
Right, which means consent was never actually given. In order for it to be consent, you have to be fully informed of and understand what you're being asked to consent to, and there has to be a realistic and meaningful way to withhold that consent.
This really makes it seem like only a very limited set of contracts would actually be legal.
To me a big problem we have is that we act as if there is a fair "fight" between a mega corporation with a expensive team of lawyers, expert psychologists, and supercomputers against ... my gandma who googles to get to google. I think we all know that nearly no one reads pretty much anything they sign and if they did it is not clear that they are fully informed, understand, or are not under pressure (clear case might be medical consent forms authorizing something like a emergency surgery. I'd find it impossible to convince me the person signing was well informed and not under duress. I'd rather case like that revolve around expert of doctors determining if an action was reasonable to another doctor rather than have anything to do with a patient or surrogate signing a document. Seems to just waste time).
It really would be great if the crack team of lawyers was required to put terms and conditions into text that is understandable by an average person in a reasonable amount of time.
There's so many adults that were clearly never taught F.R.I.E.S. and it's both depressing and horrifying.
Freely Given
Reversible
Informed
Enthusiastic
Specific
A TOS is absolutely not a contract that people enter into fully aware of the implications.
We should have granular control over the permissions we give companies in how they use data. I don't feel it is enough to require clear disclosure of the ways a company uses data, I think they should require explicit and knowing consent from the user, and the user should have a meaningful way to withhold consent other than to abstain entirely from using any online services.
It is hardly fair or equitable, and surely should not be legal that a company can, without any meaningful way for a user to withhold their consent, declare & demand unlimited control and benefit (of/from the user's data) for any purpose whatsoever, including sharing and selling said data for a profit to data brokers who have no contractual obligation to the user once they obtain the data.
I'm fully with you, but my question is how you actually inform people at the power of their data? I often pressure people into chatting with me through Signal and I'll be honest, there is often a defeatist or lack of knowledge at what this data can be used for even among graduate CS students.
Honestly, I think one of the major issues is that the world is exceptionally complex these days (well, always has been, but surely there's more now). Our entire world runs on specialization but we often act as if one needs to be an expert in nearly every domain. Is not the definition of an expert someone who understands the nuances and complexities of said niche? It would then seem de facto unreasonable for people to have a nuanced understanding of practically any given subject.
Because of this, I want to question the common framing about focusing on informing people. I don't want to stop informing people, to be clear. But I think we should look for solutions that are not reliant upon people being informed, as this is clearly not a scalable nor stable mechanism for creatures with finite ̶t̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶ knowledge and finite time.
Consider that no matter how evil the corporation, they can't seize your property or freedom. Be careful who you empower.
Yes, they can, and they have. What do you think Apple is, if not a government in corporate clothing?
Apple cannot jail you, fine you, or legally enjoin your activities.
Their behavior against Gizmodo over an iPhone 4 prototype got really close to jailing tech bloggers.
Their technical control over the signing keys that Apple devices trust also gives them the ability to enjoin shittons of otherwise legal activity (e.g. emulators).
Apple also pays shittons to have Customs & Border Patrol lock down the US border and ban iPhone parts imports that aren't authorized by Apple. Does that count as a fine?
I'm pretty sure that's already two out of three.
The first and third of those are Apple trying to get a government to do something on their behalf. The second of those is attempting to technologically restrict activities you can do with an Apple device, not legally restrict your activities in general. Apple still doesn't have the legal authority of a government, nor should it.
US history is full of examples of private corporations doing exactly this.
Are you saying that this is still done today or just bringing up an interesting historical fact?
They also use this to solve cold cases by scanning genetic databases for near matches.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/science/gedmatch-genealog...
another thing that should also be illegal. You shouldn't be able to use a 3rd party (company) to break the law (4th amendment)
Problem is if they make it illegal now you would pretty much have to release at least 2 horrible prolific serial killers
It seems to be coming out that DNA evidence is not as reliable/accurate as we have been led to believe, so yes if the evidence was illegally obtained and of questionable veracity then we should release anyone who was convicted as a result. If blame for the whole situation is required, blame the overzealous prosecutors who raced ahead with flimsy, pseudo-scientific evidence.
I don't think that they used the DNA from the databases to convict the people in these cases. I think it was more like this:
• They've got a serious crime, like a serial killer, but no real suspects. They do have some DNA that is almost certainly from the criminal but it does not match any DNA they have on file.
• Years later they compare that DNA to DNA in some large DNA database that is not focused on criminals.
• There are no matches that indicate that the criminal's DNA is in that database, but there are several matches that indicate people who are relatives of the criminal.
• They can then look at assorted public records to find people who are related in the right way to some of those relatives.
• Among those people, some previous person who either never was a suspect originally or a very weak suspect comes up. They then take a thorough look at any records can find about that person's activities at the times of the crime and find that they were actually connected to most of the victims and in the right places at the right times to be the criminal.
• That gives them enough evidence to compel a DNA sample from that person, or they start watching the person and get a DNA sample from something like a discarded napkin or cup that the person unwisely discarded in a public trashcan. That sample matches the samples from the crime scene.
• It is that latter sample, and the records of the person's activities and relationships with the victims, that form the bases of the conviction.
The point is they absolutely shouldn't have the ability to do blanket searches of DNA banks. That was my point. If they have a warrant for a killer's DNA and that person has sold DNA to 23 and Me then fine, go check his particular file. That would be kind of pointless since they could just force that person to give up their DNA with a specific warrant, but whatever. They should not be able to do pattern matching on the whole DNA database to fund an unknown killer. That would be violating my 4th amendment and 5th amendment rights because they don't have a warrant to check my DNA
Trample on the rights of hundreds of millions or release a few serial killers? I'd take the greater good option.
I hate that, but that's for the greater good. We could prevent virtually all crime if we were all required to be under video, GPS, and audio surveillance at all times and only be permitted to leave your home to go to work or shop for basic goods, otherwise face a lifetime in prison. However, that goes against common sense and agreed upon basic human rights. You should be free of government/police surveillance unless there is a warrant with very specific and limited conditions and parameters, I feel that is the spirit of the 4th amendment and bill of rights in general.
"Should" - based on what legal or even rational basis? Or just your personal and subjective "feelings"?
basic interpretation of the 4th amendment. It's basic logic. The Bill of Rights was written for a reason, and written to be understood easily by everyone, rather than needing to dig through thousands of lines of laws and legal precedents that only lawyers could interpret.
Can’t you give a false name when you submit your DNA to those ancestry services?
This goes back to Third Party Doctrine.
It's the premise that once you give up data to a third party, you no longer have any "reasonable expectation of privacy" so therefore it's not a search.
There is similar case law backing up searching your garbage can. While it's up against your house (aka still under your control), you have rights to it.. once you put it on the street for the garbage truck to collect, you've surrendered those rights.
I'm NOT saying this is good or what I like - specifically, I hate it - but it's how it currently works under US case law.
Therefore, to change things, we need Congress to write new laws and/or new Amendments. Our opinions of "how it should be done" are irrelevant unless backed by the law.
The funny thing is, when it comes to freedom of speech, the courts made the opposite decision with the State Actors doctrine. If the government wants to censor you, they can't reach through a private institution to do it. But the Third Party Doctrine says they can reach through a private institution to search and seize your property.
This is an arbitrary distinction chosen purely by judicial fiat. There was no democratic movement to strengthen 1A and weaken 4A/5A in this manner. Ergo, we shouldn't necessarily have to get Congress involved just to fix this weird inconsistency in caselaw. The courts have an understandable aversion to "legislating from the bench", but if you've already done so, I think it's fine to at least fix obvious mistakes.
I don't think the courts or the companies which hold your personal data consider you to have any property right to that data (beyond the intellectual rights you may have via any copyrights, even if you count those much personal data like your location history or your DNA isn't copyrightable). Imo when the government receives a copy of your personal data from a third party they aren't "taking your property" any more than I would be if I took a photograph of your house.
How do you imagine property rights for personal data to work? Even in places like the EU with stronger rights/protections around personal data they don't try to fit those rights/protections into the existing framework of property rights because they are so different.
We don't have to imagine, we can read their TOS.
We continue to "own" the data, but we've given them a worldwide irrevocable unlimited license to do what they want, limited only by local law.. hence why I put "own" in quotation marks.
Well that is in regard to any copyrighted material you may give them. But for uncopyrightable things like data from a heart rate sensor, or your shopping history on amazon, you can only ever own the physical objects the data is manifested in, not the data itself. And any company will definitely tell you that you have zero property rights over the actual storage devices in the datacenters where your data happens to reside.
There's a major (and important) distinction between the two scenarios.
The State Actors doctrine says that the government can't hire someone to do something on their behalf that they're not allowed to do.
Under the Third Party Doctrine, they aren't searching and seizing your property in this case, as your data is no longer your property since you gave it to that third party already.
If the government was paying Neustar (or whomever) to go acquire this data on their behalf, it would be an issue under current law. But buying something that was handed over willingly* is a different issue.
*the article makes a valid point that many people are unaware they have agreed to hand this data over to a service provider, which is something that should be addressed IMO.
You might not agree with it, but it's not an "obvious mistake" and it's not a "weird inconsistency" in caselaw.
Yes but I think the courts would instantly shoot down having the NSA collect everyone’s garbage and sift through it for anything incriminating
There's no expectation of privacy for garbage, and no fourth amendment protections for it. That's why dumpster diving remains legal as long as you don't break since other law like trespass in the process.
Yeah certain information held by third parties is already protected by statute such as video tape rental or sale records, or emails held by a service provider for less than 180 days. There really isn't a reason why congress couldn't expand similar provisions to all or most personal data held by third parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stored_Communications_Act
I'd wager you could argue that it's not possible to participate in society without internet services, and that it's not possible to use internet services without divulging personal data.
It's practically impossible to avoid giving your information to a 3rd party.
There is a whole subject called Garbology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbology
The fourth amendment is a prohibition on UNREASONABLE searches and seizures. What possible definition of "reasonable" would exclude "legally purchased on the open market"? What other perfectly reasonable techniques would you deny to law enforcement? Should they not be able to look at someone's LinkedIn? Look up their address in a phone book?
No, the constitution isn't going to protect you from the government doing what everyone else can. If we want this stuff not to be available for sale, we should regulate it.
Going a step further, they can just pay another middleman to do the analysis and write up reports to generate information to execute reasonable searches and seizures.
Actually, they can allow an entire free market of investigators to pop up and then pay them to do things. Like NHS does with doctors.
In fact, we can remove the government from the equation altogether and have a free market
That might be a good move, because this government is feeling kind of stale, but I think we'd pretty quickly realize that free markets want some things that are worth preventing and a government would emerge to keep them from turning all roads into toll roads and other such excesses.
That's actually it's literal intended purpose as far as I can tell. For example, my employer can make certain demands of my speech or otherwise punish me for my expressed opinions, while such behavior is explicitly forbidden from the government by the constitution.
That's true of the text of the first amendment, because that part is clear and unqualified ("congress shall make no law") as clearly the framers felt it was important not to be misunderstood.
Why do you think the word "unreasonable" is even in the text of the fourth then, if not to clarify that the government IS allowed[1] to do normal/legal/reasonable/whatever research?
I'm not saying you shouldn't be offended that this stuff is being gathered about you. I'm saying the constitution isn't going to protect you and you need to vote for candidates (Wyden's an excellent one!) who will pass laws to do that.
[1] Because of course it is. Again, police work requires information gathering!
Who are you more concerned about being able to query your LexisNexis report, the NSA or the domestic terrorists?
Unfortunately many (most?) people on here are in the advertising/data merchant business. You will never convince someone to understand a thing if their livelihood depends on them not understanding it.
I don't know about the rest of you, but when it comes to
- Having enough money to retire into a dystopian hellhole that I spent my younger years creating
- Making some hard decisions now so that I can have an average life in a functioning society later
I'd prefer the latter. But conveniently, it's not HN that we need to convince to reign in advertising, it's the House and the Senate, and their voters are plenty suspicious of "big tech" whatever that is.
And yeah, much more worried about the NSA than terrorists.
Wyden's letter[1] is a lot more targeted than the Techdirt article. The letter says this:
"The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical, but illegal,"
and refers specifically to an FTC order[2] that prohibits the government buying data from a specific shady broker (X-Mode Social).
He summarizes the letter on his own site without the editorializing that honestly I love so much about Techdirt.[3]
On a side-note, according to Wyden, 'Through this case, the FTC announced that Americans must be told and agree to their data being sold to “government contractors for national security purposes,” for the practice to be allowed.' I don't know how that's enforceable given how many hands user data goes through. Most organizations that suck that data up sell it to several third parties who can then sell it to whoever they want. All the NSA has to do is go a few steps down the chain.
So it doesn't matter. The NSA will continue, as you noted, to lawfully buy this data from third parties who are slightly less sketchy than X-Mode Social (what a name) and the FTC's toothless rule won't change a thing.
[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/signed_wyden_lett...
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
[3] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-relea...
I see your point. Data collection is required to some degree to, e.g., prosecute criminals. Any agency tasked with law enforcement would use all means at their disposal to do that, and legally purchasing data on the open market does seem reasonable. I agree with you that the Constitution and laws as they are today are unlikely to find any issue with the practices in place. However, my interpretation of the spirit of the fourth amendment is that Americans should not have to tolerate their government (or its agencies) infringing on their privacy unless they are suspected of having done something wrong, which is why the purchase of data from data brokers seems wrong to me.
Personally, I would deem such means permissible to investigate someone suspected of having committed a crime. Where I find issue is the widespread use of such techniques to monitor for crimes, since they come at such a large cost to personal privacy, and are searching for a needle in a haystack. Millions will have their privacy compromised so that maybe a single criminal can be caught, and personally, that cost is too high. I understand some folks might disagree that, but I hope Sen. Wyden, and others who join forces with him or follow him, will continue to represent that idea, and pursue legislation to codify it in law.
While I get your point, the constitution is fundamentally _about_ hamstringing the government in ways you're fully allowed to privately contract away. It's about saying the government may pass any and all laws within these guidelines -- that's why you can shout fire at the top of a mountain and nobody cares, but in a privately owned theater it's not a free-speech issue.
Or something like that - point is, if it wasn't doing anything wrong, why was it obscuring that fact through classification and NDA's until now - when as you say - it's public data that the government would (in your theory of constitutional law) be entitled to purchase?
seems to me, the upstream problem is data brokers.
But upstream of that is people volunteering their personal information.
The vast majority of people have not given informed nor enthusiastic consent to these practices.
That's not the standard for engaging in a commercial transaction, and never will be.
I don't think this is true for most cases. I have not volunteered or given consent for the collection of most of the data about me on these markets.
You're not wrong, but the implied solution of no data brokers is gonna be a bad thing.
The information is out there, it's stupid easy to correlate and collate it. It's even easier to use that to do something profitable.
Getting rid of data brokers, making them not exist just makes a gray market for the information, one that is just as lucrative and is going to be untaxed and unregulated.
641a was the moment privacy died. We're not getting it back. We need to come up with a better method/idea...
We need data collection laws similar to HIPAA breaches that render data collection akin to storing nuclear waste. I'd like to see this apply to aggregate data mining too, so we can get rid of things like the Topics API.
HIPAA allows your medical information to be widely shared without your consent. It just requires the many holders of the data to implement some security controls.
https://www.healthit.gov/topic/interoperability/how-hipaa-su...
There are multiple problems here, but only one of those problems works for the US people. It's clear to me which problem should be most easily addressed with the highest impact for the effort.
We're talking about the difference in trying to influence arbitrary third parties behaviors and the difference in trying to influence the behavior of your own employees.
It is and always has been legal for other people to volunteer information about you to the police. Doesn't matter if they're operating a business or not.
I can call the police right now and tell them that lumb63 posted a comment on HN at 2024-01-30T14:14:13. If I had more detailed information, I could tell them that too, and they could legally listen to me. I could tell them literally anything that I know about anyone.
Why would that be illegal?
This situation doesn't have anything to do with the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment prevents the government from forcibly taking information.
The parent understands all that, you do not need to repeat what they said themselves.
Times change, so do effects and outcomes. Laws don't have to be fixed for eternity. It would be really dumb if they did. Fortunately a system was designed to update laws in accordance with a dynamic environment.
No, I am disagreeing with what they said. The 4th amendment is not the issue. It is and should continue to be legal for people to tell the government whatever they want.
The problem here is a lack of regulation for the companies that collect this data. Forget the government, data brokers can sell to anyone they want -- a stalker, someone looking to do harm to you, etc. People are harassed, robbed, cheated, scammed, and physically harmed using this information on a regular basis.
I understand you are disagreeing. They understand that the 4th Amendment doesn't offer these protections but made a claim that it does "in spirit."
You're right, but that's not what's happening here. What's happening here is one of 2 things. 1) Government initiated: seeks out and requests information from others and in this case, offering payment. 2) Information holder initiated: who is specifically offering information in exchange for compensation. This is more akin to walking into your police station and saying "I have crimes to report, but I will only do so if you pay me first." Obviously this has perverse incentives and I think we can see how this can clearly be abused to circumvent any requirements for warrants or other such due process.
I do agree that this situation is in violation of the __spirit__ of our legal system. Clearly a loophole is de facto not in spirit. Whether that is a 4th Amendment or not, idk, IANAL and neither is the OP and I assume neither are you(?). 4th Amendment seems pretty reasonable to point to considering it mentions warrants and this practice is being done explicitly to circumvent warrant requirements. But clearly we all understand what is trying to be communicated here, and that's the point. I wouldn't have made such a comment if you mentioned explicitly third party doctrine (as casey did an hour before you) or cited some law which added clarity to the situation. But yes, everyone knows you can just freely go tell the police about a crime you witnessed. I'm not sure who does not understand this. I would be extremely surprised if anyone actually believed it was illegal to report crimes to authorities and immediately question their mental capacity. But I guess we disagree at what constitutes basic and obvious knowledge.
It doesn't violate the spirit of the 4th, nor is it a loophole. The 4th is not a prohibition on the government collecting information, nor is it a data privacy law. The 4th is about preventing the government from abusing their power to compel. Volunteered information isn't compelled by definition, so it is fine. This was the case then and it is the case now.
Like a wanted poster and a bounty for information? These existed when the BoR was written. They weren't prohibited by the writers because the writers didn't have an issue with it. The 4th isn't a "government can't know anything or can't ask anything" rule, it's a "government can't bust down your door for no reason" rule.
The example I gave was a practical illustration of how silly reality would be if third-party-doctrine wasn't a thing.
I see your point regarding wanted posters and providing bounties for info on criminals. What’s going on with the intelligence agencies buying data from data brokers is definitely similar. However, it seems to me that the scale of what is going on at present is much larger; it is likely akin to having a wanted poster and providing bounties for any info on all people, criminal or otherwise. The vast majority of people whose data is being provided are probably innocent and not suspected of any crimes at all, nor will they ever be. And, as you say, the fourth amendment is a “government can’t bust down your door for no reason” rule. It seems where we differ is that I interpret (as does the U.S. Supreme Court since Katz v. United States) the “bust down your door” part to mean much more than my physical door, which is why I find that it violates the “spirit” of the fourth amendment: in my mind, an amount of privacy that it is reasonable to expect (e.g. what entities a person is communicating with over their own internet connection) is being denied by the government to perhaps all citizens using the Internet.
It sounds like we agree that the amount of data being collected on people via the internet is way too much and should be restricted. I think that regardless of whether or not stopping the government and its agencies from purchasing such data is or is not in keeping with the spirit of the fourth amendment, we will need legislation to protect the privacy we want from the government, and definitely from corporations. Let’s work toward that end.
On the one hand, I fully agree. On the other hand, I also agree with the intuitive argument that it's very strange to let private corporations surveil and gather, buy, and sell information about citizens to exploit for profit, but then say that the government can't buy that same information for law enforcement and national security.
It feels wrong to say that it's fine for someone with only a profit motive to use private data in small, petty ways to extract more profit from someone that's already paid them, but that the duly elected representative government can't use it for big, important things. Or, if law enforcement and national security are too fraught, what about, say, public health policy?
The obvious answer is that corporations shouldn't have access to it either, but that's a much harder sell, and so we're in this weird limbo.
We make this distinction all the time in areas like speech and searches, for good reason. The government is the only entity with near-omnipotent power over you. Corporations may be powerful, but they are ultimately restrained by the government’s monopoly on force; the government has no such restraints because it has the monopoly on force. It’s therefore reasonable and prudent to have different, more stringent rules for the government. If someone working for a corporation doesn’t like you, they can’t kill or imprison you (legally). Not so for the government.
With that being said, whether or not anyone at all should be allowed to collect or use this data is also a totally valid topic for discussion and disagreement.
Someone working for the government can't legally kill or imprison you because they don't like you either.
In developed democracies, if you are a citizen, because of the tight restraints put on government power.
Those restraints are, historically, a very new idea, and they are hardly universal even today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforced_disappearance
There are 30 people in certain Bay in Cuba who would disagree with that statement.
That and the third amendment for stationing a "soldier" (tracking and data collection) in our home (phone). And it needs to be extended to monopoly involuntary "private" entities with known federal sweetheart deals.
The same phone you voluntarily purchased, brought into your home and agreed to the terms of service on?
"Rights" - even those enshrined in the Bill of Rights - are trampled on daily.
Try traveling with a concealed firearm across state lines. Or telling a K-9 police officer they can't search your car after the dog has alerted. Or use your free speech privilege to spread alleged vitriol.
There's no such thing as "rights" - only what individuals can defend in the current place and time they're in.
Or simply having the audacity to travel on an airplane.
I suppose that is the way it always has been. When the government was small people just didn't care what they were up to. The people became complacent and allowed a beast to grow. If the rights we are supposed to have keep getting trampled on revolution is inevitable. It may take a long hellish time to happen but that is one fork in the path we are on.
I doubt it. The data collected by brokers is going to all be indemnified by whoever collected the data. If they have all have posted privacy policies that include data collection and dissemination then it's fair game. I'm not sure the policies would even need to be airtight so long as the NSA and data brokers acted in good faith that they believed the policies were sound.
Tragically the 4th amendment is kinda narrow. I would definitely appreciate some additions which enshrine a more specific right to privacy. Protecting against "unlawful" searches (AKA you have to take the case to court afterwards) is far to close to meaningless. Feels like the 4th amendment is about 10% as powerful as it should be.