Alfred Ng and Maddy Varner, the Markup: All in all, we found 25 companies whose combined spending on federal lobbying totaled $29 million in 2020. Many of the top spenders were not pure data brokers but companies that nonetheless have massive data operations. Oracle, which has spent the past decade acquiring companies that collect data, spent […]
Patrick McGee and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times: According to recent internal documents seen by the Financial Times, Snap wanted to gather data from companies that analyse whether people have responded to ad campaigns, including aggregated IP addresses, the labels that identify devices connected to the internet. It hoped it could take that data and cross-reference […]
This piece from the New York Times editorial board just three days ago sets the tone for the main topic, I think: Americans have become inured to the relentless collection of their personal information online. Imagine, for example, if getting your suit pressed at the dry cleaner’s automatically and permanently signed you up to have […]
Andrés Arrieta of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: In reality, a number of studies have shown that most of the money made from targeted advertising does not reach the creators of the content—the app developers and the content they host. Instead, the majority of any extra money earned by targeted ads ends up in the pockets […]
Byron Tau, Wall Street Journal: Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google will ban the data broker X-Mode Social Inc. from collecting any location information drawn from mobile devices running their operating systems in the wake of revelations about the company’s national-security work. The two largest mobile-phone platforms told developers this week that they must remove […]
Hamed Aleaziz and Caroline Haskins, Buzzfeed News: In an internal memo obtained by BuzzFeed News, the DHS’s top attorney, Chad Mizelle, outlined how ICE officials can look up locations and track cellphone data activity to make decisions on enforcement. […] The document says that ICE and CBP purchased people’s mobile data from a data broker, […]
There is a remarkable series of stories that Joseph Cox of Motherboard has been reporting over the past couple of months, describing the ways location data, IP addresses, and other private information is being sold to vendors and, eventually, law enforcement. I think these articles are best presented together, for the fullest context. Here’s the […]
Byron Tau, Wall Street Journal: Anomaly Six LLC, a Virginia-based company founded by two U.S. military veterans with a background in intelligence, said in marketing material it is able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications, in part through its own software development kit, or SDK, that is embedded directly in some […]
Bruce Schneier, in an op-ed for the New York Times: Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won’t make any difference if, in response, surveillance systems switch to identifying people by smartphone MAC addresses. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or […]
There’s a silly dismissal of privacy laws that goes something like this: because these laws require that data processors get opt-in consent from users, they empower Facebook and Google, which means these laws are failures on a grand scale. I thought this argument was absurd when it first appeared last year in relation to Europe’s […]
Adam Walser, ABC Tampa Bay: I-Team Investigator Adam Walser obtained records showing the state sold information on Florida drivers and ID cardholders to more than 30 private companies, including marketing firms, bill collectors, insurance companies and data brokers in the business of reselling information. The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles raked in […]
Katie Notopoulos, BuzzFeed News: Facebook launched a transparency tool this week that will give people a little more information about how their targeted ads work (good!). Now you can see more details about why you’re seeing an ad in your feed, how it is linked to an ad agency or data broker, and how to […]
Jeremy Burge: For years Facebook claimed the adding a phone number for 2FA was only for security. Now it can be searched and there’s no way to disable that. Facebook 2FA numbers are also shared with Instagram which prompts you ‘is this your phone number?’ once you add to FB. Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch: Last year, […]
Tim Cook in Time: Meaningful, comprehensive federal privacy legislation should not only aim to put consumers in control of their data, it should also shine a light on actors trafficking in your data behind the scenes. Some state laws are looking to accomplish just that, but right now there is no federal standard protecting Americans […]
David McCabe and Scott Rosenberg, Axios: For several years it has made sense, in some quarters, to lump together the tech giants — chiefly Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, sometimes also including Netflix or Microsoft. But talking about “big tech” is beginning to offer diminishing returns. […] As different pressures come to bear on each […]
Aliya Ram and Madhumita Murgia, Financial Times: Data brokers mine a treasure trove of personal, locational and transactional data to paint a picture of an individual’s life. Tastes in books or music, hobbies, dating preferences, political or religious leanings, and personality traits are all packaged and sold by data brokers to a range of industries, chiefly banks […]
Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore, in an astonishing investigation for the New York Times: For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews. […]
The New York Times editorial board (via Sarah Jeong): But search engines put the home addresses of the entire nation a few keystrokes away. And there’s an entirely legal industry that peddles that and other personal information for a price. Search for a name in Google, and you may very well find a number of […]
Mark Bergen and Jennifer Surane, Bloomberg: Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Mastercard Inc. brokered a business partnership during about four years of negotiations, according to four people with knowledge of the deal, three of whom worked on it directly. The alliance gave Google an unprecedented asset for measuring retail spending, part of the search giant’s strategy […]
Olivia Solon, the Guardian: Nameless New York taxi logs were compared with paparazzi shots at locations around the city to reveal that Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba were bad tippers. In 2017 German researchers were able to identify people based on their “anonymous” web browsing patterns. This week University College London researchers showed how they […]