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Data Brokers, Gun Owners, and Consumer Privacy
New submitter FreaKBeaNie writes "Earlier this month, the FTC issued 9 orders to data brokerage companies to learn more about their privacy practices. Data brokers are skilled at connecting quasi-private data with publicly available data, like voter rolls, housing sales, and now gun ownership records. Unlike merchants or business partners, these data brokers may or may not have had any interaction with the 'subjects' of their data collection."
So what? There is no story here. I understand that you want to promote your blog, but it pisses me off that Slashdot facilitates you.
How about some "news for nerds" stuff that splatters less would be nice. This post belongs in a fan, if you catch my meaning.
"Fraud" is illegal but being criminally careless with this "protected" data is commonplace and is often nearly unpunished.
None of this would be possible without the right algorithms. I'm sure that there are coders who will always do such things, just like there are medical doctors who engage in borderline therapies; but, shouldn't the rest of us have a Code of Ethics against it?
I never thought I'd see the day when our data privacy was being protected to this degree by the FTC. But I am all in favor.
Bitcoin, baby!
Once this starts hitting gun owners, we'll hear screams for stronger privacy legislation.
Dear Mr. Savage: As an AR-15 owner, you need the best magazines and ammo! Stainless steel 30 round magazines for your assault rifle! Great deals on bulk ammo! This is the good stuff, military grade Federal XM855 Green Tip Steel Penetrator! Made in USA! 500 rounds per box! Check out our ammo can bundles! Order today! And don't forget your AR-15 cleaning kit. (Expect delays due to high order volume).
(There's been a big increase in assault rifle sales since the last school massacre. Hence the ordering delays.)
My neighbors may or may not be kitten killing mass murderers. I'm not saying they are. But they may be! What is this? Fox news?
Why don't I own the copyright to my own data? If it has commercial value, how is it that others are allowed to profit by buying and selling it without my permission?
what about a engineer like Code of Ethics for code that for stuff like autopilots / medical hardware needs engineer like sign offs with the power to SAY NO to the PHB who wants to push out poor code just to meet a deadline.
adam savage can just fire a cannon at you business with a cannon ball made from your junk mail.
Most articles that claim to be written on the topic of privacy are actually about anonymity - we in large civilizations have gotten used to being mostly anonymous in public. Not because it was ever really true, and certainly not because it was ever a right. Our public anonymity could always be punctured by anyone with enough of an interest - law enforcement, PIs, even plain old stalkers or nosey neighbors. Public anonymity is inversely proportional to how interesting you are.
It follows that there is no legal basis for preventing anyone (person or company) from collecting information from any legal sources, correlating it, building detailed profiles and behavioral models. If your CC agreement denys the CC company the right to keep and sell information about your purchases, good for you: otherwise, everything you do is being captured and sold. It's just too easy now (and that's the big difference from the public anonymity we all grew used to in the past.)
So what legal activity is actually justified in this context? For one, you should strictly defend any contract you have with your service providers - ensure that they are living up to their end of it. Second, we probably need a revamped libel law that will create significant punitive damages if any information broker promulgates false information about you (ie "slander"). It used to be that slander was primarily attached to public figures, but that was really just because they were the only ones anyone paid enough attention to. All that's changed is that there are now many companies publishing (in one form or other) information about virtually everyone. They all need to be held to high standards of integrity - this is not a case where we should let the market set price/quality punishment for bad behavior.
Parent is trolling more than fishermen this time of year.
The real problem with these shootings isn't guns, it's the crazy people behind them, more to the point, the crazy people that everyone knew were nuts, but no one knew what to do with. If you think this is a wake up call for gun control, you're 100% wrong. This is a wake up call for better mental health care and screening.
Nuts *might benefit* from better health care. But also, it would be best if nuts couldn't get easy access to guns.
If guns and ammos are available in supermarkets and if people can store any weapon they want at home, if a crazies snaps, he can immediatly grab the nearest weapon and go on a rampage.
An impulsive idea can immediately be but in action.
On the other hand, with gun control laws, the acquisition of weapon might require complex paperwork, and guns able to find big number of ammos might be required to be stored at the armoury. If a crazies snaps, he can't immediatly act his rage out. He first needs to jump through the necessary hoops in order to get access to his weapon (either going through all the steps required to buy one, or having to go get back the weapon from its storage while filling the necessary paperwork). This takes time, and this delay might be enough to unwind the crazy.
An impulse can't immediatly be put into action, and by the time the crazies finishes preparing his stuff, the anger could probably have gone down.
Gun control laws aren't here to stop criminal organising a robbery (determined criminals will always be able to get access to a gun).
Gun control are here to slow down/delay some nut going postal and give them time to think again about their actions.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"The USSR and China had almost no internal terrorist attacks from the generation after banning religion."
Actually they had many terrorist attacks - it's just that the terrorists were the state. Random violence and disappearances designed to terrorise the populace into submission. Worked very effectively. Banning religion had nothing to do with it. Read 1984 and understand what the Telescreen really was.
First, "Weapon of Mass Destruction" is a term-of-art, not a slogan. It specifically refers to a class of weapons designed so that a single device can wipe-out a large population - and the definition has always been: Nuclear, Biological or Chemical (NATO and US forces used to refer to this as "NBC warfare"). In the post-9/11 world, however, with new laws on terrorism, Orwellian politicians and activists of various stripes have all been calling anything they dislike "WMD"; the term is being watered-down by mis-use and de-valued just like the words "Holocaust" and "Racist".
Second, Nearly all firearms in the US are semi-automatic (technically even most revolvers are "semi-automatic" though the term is not usually stretched that far --- not yet). The fact is that most non-revolver pistols are every bit as "semi-automatic" as an AR-15 or an AK-47. Most civilians could not manage a completely manual firearm (not even a revolver), and the nation's founders never would have intended them to. The founders of the nation intended that the citizens would all be armed with front-line military weapons (both so that they could deter and repel and foreign invaders and also so they could deter and block any future American tyrant). George Washington specifically wrote that the citizens had a right to keep and bear both pistols and rifles and Jefferson (an inventor) was well-aware of automation, so the idea that guns would become automated would have been no surprise to him. The problem with firearms has NEVER been the inanimate object, just as neither alcohol nor cars are the cause of the annual 20,000+ drunk driving deaths. The problem in all these cases is the human being
All of the mass shootings in recent US history have involved [1] a border-line crazy person who had given previous warnings of extreme dysfunction and [2] a "gun-free zone" where the evil bastard could be confident that his targets were unarmed sheep ready for slaughter.
It's nearly comical to watch all the anti-gun activists go through various contortions to desperately avoid the facts in these arguments. The previous poster (like every pro-2nd-ammendment guy who tries to get a word in edge-wise with Piers Morgan) was correct on the FACTS; When a typical member of the public sees an AR-15 and hears the words "assault weapon" he thinks "machine gun" ... this is by design and it's pure propaganda (actual machines guns have been illegal for decades). There has never actually been a gun term "assault weapon" ... that's a synthetic propaganda term designed to convey impressions and distort debate, much like the words "hate speech", "homophobia", etc. It's also a fact that an AR-15 is less dangerous than many deer rifles (I have experience with both). The AR-15 might look "cool" (or menacing, depending on your political leanings) but it's real charm is simply that many Americans who have served in the military are comfortable/familiar with the overall design (which is solid and reliable), the rounds are common, and the thing looks intimidating to the sort of stupid thug one might want to deter with it. Nearly all other American weapons can fire rounds just as fast. If you have bought into the whole "assault weapon" thing, you have been manipulated; I prefer the U.S. Constitution including the 2nd amendment ... which is what guarantees the other amendments.
BTW: The NRA is wrong: the answer is not to have armed guards everywhere (though they do have an interesting point that we guard all sorts of things we value, like money, with armed guards while refusing such guards for the kids of the non-rich). Our founders never imagined a nation with armed guards in uniforms at every building; they presumed every citizen would be armed as appropriate to protect himself, his family and his business and crime would be low without a ubiquitous display of guns because
Until software engineers have the same kind of code of ethics and sign offs that other engineers have I don't think they are really engineers.
Right now if you are a software engineer and you say no to something you are very likely to be fired. If you are a chemical engineer and you tell your boss no for something then they can't do it without some pretty severe legal consequences and if they fire you the consequences are even more severe.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
That particular objection is irrelevant. It isn't the fact that some random person's anonymity can be broken by a sufficiently determined attacker with sufficient application of effort. It's the fact that nowadays, everyone's anonymity is being broken on an industrial scale and offered to every potential attacker with no effort required on their part.
The scale is everything. The scale of privacy violations undermines society, which didn't happen before, when only a tiny fraction of people's privacy was being abused.
It has got to stop, and that means no-nonsense legal enforcement of information hoarding prevention. It's easy enough to do. The IRS audits thousands of companies and individuals to make sure they pay their taxes. It would be practical to audit companies' storage and use of their customers' personal data, and make sure it gets deleted completely on a regular schedule.
A gun is VERY different than land with a house on it. Some relevant differences:
1) A house costs hugely more than a gun.
2) The value of a house, both for tax and resale purposes, is a function of its sales history and the sales history of neighboring houses. Not at all true for guns.
3) The ownership of a house requires the payment of a yearly tax, based on its value. Not so with a gun.
4) Many, many useful services require knowledge about who lives where in order to do their jobs (police, fire, utilities, delivery services, and so on). None of this is true of a gun.
So, it makes perfect sense that we would treat information about houses differently than information about guns (or other stuff you might buy from walmart).
I can't tell. Are you being serious or sarcastic?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The Communists were very religious. Their religion was atheism, and they forced it on the populace with murderous fervor.
In point of fact, of course, anonymity isn't a 'right' and never has been. In fact, the bulk of human history has been one in which people know the people around them very well (and by that I mean know them, their parents, their extended family, etc.).
In fact, anonymity was regarded as SUSPICIOUS. If nobody knew you at all, how could they know what to expect from you?
While I suspect that the bulk of /. modernistas would shudder at this level of 'public knowledge, personally, I strongly suspect that's one of the actual drivers behind what people tend to call a drop in 'decency' between individuals today. Anonymity makes it incredibly easy to be selfish and entirely self-interested. After all, who's going to know? (And deep down, I think most of us believe/know that it's wrong to be entirely selfish.) Even better, today you can go further than anonymity to MANAGING your image - you can be an entirely selfish, greedy prick but drive a prius (thus you 'care' about the planet), twitter about how you're supporting this or that cause (with some tiny amount on kickstarter) or facebook to make sure some trivial gesture you make is noticed by everyone.
I think what makes people uncomfortable with a loss of anonymity is that with knowledge comes judgement. As much as you might stamp your foot and say "don't judge me" that's precisely what people will do based on their accumulated knowledge (often collectivized by gossip, of course). Is it always fair? No. Often, for example, the sins of the parents are by implication linked to the kids (alcoholism, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, etc)* creating what might be a vicious, inescapable cycle.
*of course, I watch with some amusement as we're starting to find genetically inherited markers which DO indicate these tendencies move in family lines...
But personally, I'd FAR rather live in a small community of people who've been there a while, in which we ALL know each other to some degree and have a reputation to uphold, than to be 'totally anonymous' in some faceless city/neighborhood where everyone's a stranger.
-Styopa
The linked article about the FTC proposal mentions requiring data brokers to give persons the right to opt-out. But that is of little use.
The requirement should be for opt-in before a data broker can do anything with your personal data. The various public records, such as birth, property transaction, motor vehicle, and etc., are held by those respective agencies for legitimate purposes to provide specifically authorized services, to satisfy certain legal requirements, or at the persons request. Those agencies should be required to notify persons whenever a data broker or other government agency gathers the records (and the cost of doing so should be paid by the data broker), and the data broker should be required to provide detailed explanation as to why they need the data and what they intended to do with, and then get explicit consent from the person before proceeding.
I have seen data brokers, for instance "MyLife.com", publishing persons' age and gender. (That was part of the "teaser" information they give away for free and shows up in Google search result summaries. Then they try to sell subscriptions for additional information or to let you "manage" the data they disseminate about you.)
In case you did not know this, in the US employment discrimination based on certain categories such as age and gender is against federal law. But if a data broker organization is leaking this kind of restricted personal data, how is one supposed to be protected from hiring managers covertly practicing this kind of illegal discrimination?
In most situations there is no need to differentiate between privacy and anonymity if we view anonymity as simply one aspect of a more general concept of privacy.
Most articles that claim to be written on the topic of privacy are actually about anonymity - we in large civilizations have gotten used to being mostly anonymous in public. Not because it was ever really true, and certainly not because it was ever a right.
The wording of your statement is unclear, what is "it" referring to?
If you are claiming that privacy is not a right recognized by the legal system that simply isn't true: the Supreme Court recognized a limited right to privacy in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). Further, there are ideas about privacy going way back in English Common Law: you can use the wikipedia page Privacy_laws_of_the_United_States as a starting point for getting references that discuss the older legal concepts.
If we view privacy as a broad general right, then we can treat anonymity is simply one aspect of privacy, and thus privacy, as a right recognized by the legal system, also covers anonymity.
It follows that there is no legal basis for preventing anyone (person or company) from collecting information from any legal sources, correlating it, building detailed profiles and behavioral models.
This also isn't true. James Madison wrote the Bill of Rights to address two fundamental issues the Anti-Federalists had with the Constitution: 1) There was no list of fundamental rights that could be used to limit the power of government, and 2) any list would necessarily be incomplete. He dealt with the second issue by making the Bill of Rights open-ended: the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" and the 10th Amendment provides for unspecified rights "reserved to the people", allowing for rights to be asserted as needed at future times when it was discovered that the current list was incomplete.
Thus, rights not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights do have a legal basis, when we decide they arise under the 9th/10th Amendments (the 9th Amendment was explicitly mentioned in the Griswold v. Connecticut ruling). By asserting such a right, we can prevent someone from engaging in business practices that violate this right. This goes far beyond what can be achieved using mere contract or libel law, as a fundamental right can not be taken away by contract and the kinds of manipulative games unethical businesses engage in.
Does it matter?
'Assault weapon' is a legal term. As in defined by a law. Perfectly fine to use to refer to certain types of weapons. You could look it up.
No, society as a whole is NOT safer with all these semi-automatic and assault weapons out there. Compare - US, Japan, Austrailia.
Assault, by the way, does not mean 'violent unjust attack'. Words mean things when you use them as well. Assault can be part of defense, but the unemotional point is that society as a whole is safer if the person of average and below average intelligence and skill (99% when the two factors are combined) does not have assault weapons.
But rifles of any kind, be they AR style or bolt action are rarely used in a crime. AR style are used in less than 0.001%. Most murders that are committed with a firearm use no more than one shot (US bureau of statistics) BTW Feinstine(sp?) is going after all firearms as well as registering even antiques. Read the bill, not what she claims is in it!
And here I'd been thinking I was the only one who acknowledged the bath massacre. Hover I think you will find it was a disgruntled janitor who used Dynamite.
Sure, the firearms were simpler then, but so were all the other things, like the vehicles (ride a horse, ride or sail a boat, or ride in a horse-pulled cart).
If you actually read all the other stuff our founders wrote, you see that the 2nd amendment had nothing to do with hunting or recreation; they assumed any free people could obviously do those things. Their reasons for the 2nd amendment were:
All of these reasons for the 2nd amendment are undermined if you allow the government to control who has weapons, how many they have, what type they have, how much ammo they have, where they keep them, etc. (and that's why every tyrant tries to impose some or all of those things). The simple fact is that our founders made it very clear that they intended the citizens to have the front-line weapons (and the guns the Americans had in the revolutionary war were actually superior to the weapons of the British troops .... which meant that our founders wanted "the people" to have guns that were BETTER than the guns of the front-line troops of the best military on Earth.
If you insist that the founders only intended the citizens to have single-round muzzle-loaded flintlock rifles, then for the sake of consistency (and so the 2nd amendment can still fill its role) you must also insist that the government:
For the Constitution to work, the power must be balanced as it was designed to be ..... and as the past few decades are demonstrating with ever-increasing clarity, our government is becoming increasingly bloated, expensive, inefficient and bullying as the power balance between the citizens and the politicians in DC gets further out of line. The entire POINT of the "right to bear arms" is that the citizens are SUPERIOR to, and in control of, the federal government and the CITIZENS are the ones with the power; in the U.S. the PEOPLE are sovereign. People who push the "huntin
Try READING what our founders actually WROTE! They wrote a LOT about this stuff ... it was VERY important to them.
The founders of the nation wanted the people to have both rifles AND pistols (Washington himself made this point in writing) and they wanted those to be the EXACT military weapons that the government had. They did NOT define a "militia" as an organized uniform-wearing national-guard-type force that was under ANY form of government control (if it's controlled by the government it can hardly be expected to deter the government) .... they defined the "militia" as ALL able-bodied competent adult men who were not consciencious objectors (and that's still actually US law ... US military regs up until only a few decades ago called this the "inactive reserve" force. it might still be in there .... I have not looked lately).
Nobody on the pro-gun side is "cherry-picking" anything ..... we are DEPENDING on the strict construction of the constitution and those original meanings you so clearly dislike. Unfortunately for people who "think" like you do, our founders were rather prolific writers and they were very thoughtful ..... they left us with many volumes of writings about exactly what they thought and believed and WHY. There is nothing frivolous in the Constitution and none of the words are just accidental. They very specifically did NOT write the second amendment as: "For the security of the nation, the states shall maintain armed organized militias. The citizens may each have one basic rifle for hunting and one basic pistol for duels". The founders INTENDED that nobody would be able to tell the the so-called "gun nuts" what to do .... they established a clear chain-of-command for the Army and Navy (note: the Marines are part of the Navy, and the Air Force was formed as the "Army Air Corps" (and for benefit of Barack Obama, that's pronounced "core" not "corpse")) but did not establish ANY chain of command for the "militias" ( doing so would have meant ALL adult men were in the Presidential chain-of-command and we would have a police state). The true "Neanderthals" as you put it (and IF they exist), can only be the people like yourself who want to turn the calendar back to pre-Constitution days. It's shocking that we have produced a generation of people so poorly educated, so completely ignorant of history and political theory, and so completely devoid of the intellectual curiosity required to READ what's freely available that they "think" the sort of things you wrote AND believe themselves well-educated!
... did not also publish the data from the thousands of documents the Obama administration is hiding (and that Atty Gen Holder is in contempt of congress for withholding from a lawful subpoena) about the thousands of assault weapons they transferred to Mexican drug gangs
"We the people" need AR-15s, big magazines, hollow-point rounds and body armor etc .... to defend ourselves from the criminal gangs that our own federal government has been supplying with crate-loads of "assault weapons". These are the same team-Obama chuckle-heads who are calling for "gun control" to take guns away from our law-abiding citizens. Some of those guns were used to shoot-up a school in Mexico ..... Oddly: President Obama did not go on TV to cry over those school kids .... I guess there was no way to use it politically, particularly because HE was the supplier of the so-called "assault weapons"
All terrorism is done by people ..... so by your thinking, we should ban people
First, WHAT people believe is every bit as important as THAT they believe. There are a great many religions (particularly when you count sects/denominations) and of those VERY FEW have any tie to violence.
Second, some violence commonly blamed on religion (like the violence in Ireland) is not religious at all. The troubles in Ireland fall along religious lines BUT these are actually political lines that line-up with religious lines. To massively over-simplify: The Catholics tend to be for separation from the folks in London and the Protestants tend to want better relations with those folks in London (see King Henry VIII and the CoE for some of the context). AFAIK nobody has ever seen a member of the IRA screaming his disagreements over interpretations of the writings of the Apostle Paul as he fired his weapon and I doubt there have been any protestants there who shrieked about their disagreements with a papal decree while shooting at an IRA member....
When the state casts a suspicious eye upon somebody, it has an obligation to narrow the scope as much as possible ..... and in the current era nearly all religious violence on the surface of the planet has been committed by members of one particular religion. Nobody should "ban" that religion (and indeed, thoughts and beliefs cannot ever be "banned" anyway) but it means that if any special scrutiny must be applied it should be to followers of that one faith ..... and to the extent possible only to the smallest subset of those that is practical.
You are correct on your history of US school violence however .... a bomb not an "assault gun" and although I think you are correct that the perpetrator was Catholic (cannot recall and do not wish to google it) I do not recall that THAT was his motive.