Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk

Buying commercially available location records from data brokers would be far less concerning without the capability to, per Anthropic’s CEO words, assemble from that data “a comprehensive picture of any person's life—automatically and at massive scale”. It’s a world of difference between when you have to work hard to construct (and keep up-to-date) such a picture for a single individual, and when someone can do it for an entire city with no effort.

This story cones uo time and time again, people rail about the data buyer, but practically speaking any one or thing can buy that data and use it against you and yours. The very collection/assembly of life data is dangerous.

Listen, this is nothing new. You can find articles like that going back years and years. The truth is: convenience trumps privacy in practice in a lot of cases. Two examples:

1. Theoretically speaking, my (data) privacy is of a high value to me! -- Then you should stop using a smart phone. -- Well...

2. I don't want anyone to create a profile of my habits because it's none of their business! -- Hi, do you have a Walmart+ card? -- Sure, here you go!

And I actually like the concept of reward cards (although I don't use them) because it is pretty much the only way how you can make money off your data.

The irony of npr.org welcoming me with

"We and our 474 partners store and access personal data, like browsing data or unique identifiers, on your device."

474!!!

Not enough people are talking about this. It seems to me like the vast majority of people just don't care, primarily because they don't understand the ways it could dramatically impact them in the future. Short term thinking is a scary phenomenon.

I remember term "privacy laundering" and "surveillance capitalism".

Example 2019 article https://www.lawfareblog.com/facebook-encryption-and-dangers-...

In reality nothing new.