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April 18, 2022: Why you should be worried about data brokers

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Today: Why you should be worried about data brokers

First, on Twitter and Elon Musk:

• Takeover bid of Twitter met with "poison pill" defense.

• Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech (Renee DiResta in the Atlantic, April 14, 2022): "Twitter serves less as a town square than as a gladiatorial arena. It’s where competitors kill off one another while the crowd cheers, where teams compete in winner-take-all contests, where unending ideological demolition derbies go in circles." (Responding to Elon Musk's comment that Twitter is “the de facto public town square.”)

• I'm stepping away for awhile.

On data brokers

• Credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion

• Data Brokers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO, April 10, 2022)

• Spokeo.com, PeopleSmart.com, FamilyTreeNow.com, MyLife.com, Whitepages.com, Intelius.com - see more resources on Mark's Good Reports site

It's not just data brokers

• Intuit (Turbo Tax) and H&R Block: You agreed to what? Tax sites want your data for more than filing. (by Geoffrey Fowler, Washington Post, April 12, 2022): revealing "a little-discussed evolution of the tax-prep software industry from mere processors of returns to profiteers of personal data. It’s the Facebook-ization of personal finance."

• Trackers: Who Tracks You When You Read the News? (Bill Fitzgerald, March 8, 2022): "Most people have never heard of the sites that track us when we read the news — and even if we have heard of them, we might not know that they are in the tracking business."

"As one example, Beeswax is used on 24 of the 30 sites in this scan. ... Despite people having no knowledge of Beeswax, the company claims the right to collect a lot of information about us."

"...To summarize: Beeswax can collect your precise location — so, if you’re reading The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal while sitting at your kitchen table, Beeswax’s privacy policy appears to specify that they can collect and store that information. With that location in hand, Beeswax’s privacy policy states that they can get more data from unnamed third party companies about you. And, if you have more than one device (say, a phone, a connected speaker, and a computer), Beeswax’s privacy policy says it can actively tie all of these devices to you."

• Patient-community and health sites: Health Sites Let Ads Track Visitors Without Telling Them (Wired, Feb 6, 2022): "researchers found that several genetic-testing and digital-medicine companies had shared customer information with Facebook for ad targeting. ... when it comes to vulnerable communities like patients and community organizers, there's a pressing need for clear policies and controls."

• Amazon employees: Amazon's Dark Secret: It Has Failed to Protect Your Data (Wired, Nov 18, 2021): "According to internal documents reviewed by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and WIRED, Amazon's vast empire of customer data—its metastasizing record of what you search for, what you buy, what shows you watch, what pills you take, what you say to Alexa, and who's at your front door—had become so sprawling, fragmented, and promiscuously shared within the company that the security division couldn't even map all of it, much less adequately defend its borders. ... Across Amazon, some low-level employees were using their data privileges to snoop on the purchases of celebrities, while others were taking bribes to help shady sellers sabotage competitors' businesses, doctor Amazon's review system, and sell knock-off products to unsuspecting customers."

• Governments: How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens (by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker, April 25 & May 2, 2022), on "Pegasus, a spyware technology designed by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, which can extract the contents of a phone, giving access to its texts and photographs, or activate its camera and microphone to provide real-time surveillance—exposing, say, confidential meetings. ... there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe."

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