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NSA Revelation Leads FTC To Propose "Reclaim Your Name" Initiative
First time accepted submitter clegrand writes "Julie Brill, a member of the Federal trade Commission, has proposed a voluntary big data industry initiative to allow consumers access to their personal records and the ability to correct them. She has coined it 'Reclaim Your Name.' While some big data companies such as Acxiom already allow such access, it is not an industry-wide practice. She sees this campaign as a natural extension of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and a logical partner for the ongoing effort of the Do Not Track mechanism currently under standardization review with the W3C."
Yes, they wouldn't want to be keeping inaccurate dossiers on you. Why with your cooperation there is no limit to what they can know about you. Terrorism will be a thing of the past. So of course that means that we can repeal the various Patriot type acts that the western world has been going gonzo over for the past decade.
Good luck with that. There was an expose' a year or two ago on TV that I watched showing just how futile it is to try and correct ANY wrong negative info in your credit reports with any of the agencies. To the point that many agencies simply didn't do anything at all when you contact them, except send you around in circles (if you are even that lucky).
So you can make all the laws you want, probably won't make a damn bit of difference. Plus, consumers have NO IDEA how many records are being kept about them and shared and aggregated and combined and by whom.
If a lot of libertarians are right, this initiative will rapidly be adopted. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information, and in individual consumer's interests to correct their own info. Libertarian theory says that the free market should have a lot of incentive to correct for bad info.
My own bet is that this will not happen. Fifty years from now, most of the organizations that 'should' voluntarily embrace this initiative, will still be ignoring it, and the invisible hand crew will be saying that the market will correct eventually, and stop trying to hurry it along.
Who is John Cabal?
http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/Protection-of-freedoms-in-France
While some big data companies such as Acxiom already allow such access, ...
Really? How? None of the articles say so..
All that's mentioned is this:
Acxiom, announced that it plans to open its dossiers so that consumers can see the information the company holds about them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have plans to call you in the morning and I have plans to put the check in the mail.
Perhaps the pumpkin patch isn't sincere enough?
"Voluntary" and "ability to correct them" How about "compulsory" "removal" of my data if I should choose?
Everyone should go back and read about what the NSA program has been collecting. There are no dossiers in the programs that have recently come to light; it's metadata, and in some cases raw data. The phone information, for example, is which numbers called which other numbers and for how long. It's not like a credit report where there is derivative information; they go to the database when they want to look up associations between entities. Creating dossiers on hundreds of millions of people at random is hugely wasteful, since (conservatively) 99.9999% of the time it'd be a total waste of time and the person would never be of interest. The NSA isn't dumb when it comes to this stuff, ethical concerns about whether they should be doing it aside.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I find it amusing when I get mail addressed to Return to Sender and Destroy Junk Mail because I used that as a real name on some website 2 years ago. If they require a phone number I usually give them their own number.
. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information
agreed.
and in individual consumer's interests to correct their own info.
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on their goals. Being obscured would suit some (many?) people just fine. It depends what value people assign to different things.
Libertarian theory says that the free market should have a lot of incentive to correct for bad info.
In a free market environment without corporations (government-granted exemptions from liability) and courts that respected property rights this might very well be true. Are you willing to allow that theory to be tested?
and the invisible hand crew will be saying that the market will correct eventually, and stop trying to hurry it along
I can't name a single libertarian who thinks that the government-corporate collusion that's going on to invade the privacy of US residents (and others) is likely to subside voluntarily. Ask Joseph Nacchio how well it works out if you put the interests of your customers over those of the State. And before you say, "but he did something wrong," realize that the entire purpose of PRISM and its ilk is to make a retrospectable list of crimes and prohibition violations that every American commits. You too.
"The invisible hand" is Smith's market-god but Austrian price-information theory and its compliment, game theory, do provide a testable framework for information dispersal in free markets. That requires investigation of mid-to-late 20th century scholarship, though, not ideas that came two centuries before. And also markets that aren't artificially manipulated, for best effect, though the theory does work when such intrusions are counted as costs and losses.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What the hell are you talking about?
Libertarianism is a set of related political philosophies that uphold liberty as the highest political end. This includes emphasis on the primacy of individual liberty, political freedom, and voluntary association. It is the antonym to authoritarianism. Libertarians advocate a society with a greatly reduced state or no state at all
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
Libertarianism is about individual liberty, period. They believe that liberty is a human right, and no public need is great enough to give cause to remove it from the individual. It has absolutely nothing to do with this story. From the Libertarians point of view the FTC and even the credit burrows wouldn't exist, as both limit the liberty of the individual through regulation. Libertarians believe the only laws and regulations that should be created are ones that increase Liberty and prevent authoritarian control of the populace by Government or other citizens. i.e. Murder would be illegal because it obviously takes liberty away from the victim.
Please don't talk shit about political philosophies you clearly know absolutely nothing about.
Suppose that I as a private person collected data about people, did not correct errors, and passed it around to the world as I see fit. If a credit agency can do that and be immune from suits or criminal charges what concept in American law permits a credit bureau to do it? Seems like equal before the law resides in the toilet.
It's everything unencrypted across the internet. Your searches, your email content if not encrypted, your URLs, your passwords to anything unencrypted. All is filed away. 100% of it. Your phone metadata, including location data (yes Clapper is lying to Congress again, we know already location data is collected by the NSA). Who you donate to, what you read, all the comments you made, your anon slashdot posts, everything. An additional feed comes in from the UK taps. That's even bigger.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining
From 'Boundless Informant' leak we learned that 90 billion pieces of intelligence are collected a month, this number does not include the stuff obtained via a FISA warrant, it does not include the count of phone metadata for example, or the internet taps or Google taps, or Hotmail taps, obtained via FISA or through PRISM. Boundless Informant FAQ explains it doesn't cover these programs. These include 3 billion additional records the NSA obtained on Americans, and as yet unexplained. These are neither phone meta data nor internet because those would be FISA items, we know this from the leaked memo.
"The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013."
You said this: "Creating dossiers on hundreds of millions of people at random is hugely wasteful, since (conservatively) 99.9999% of the time it'd be a total waste of time and the person would never be of interest."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-authorised-obama
"The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian."
And they do mine it too, even Americans:
"Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret."
And they have a $24 BILLION cyber budget to do it, and Internet Archive tech works out they could store phone calls for $20 million a year. So yes they store everything,
Funny how the bill does not apparently allow suing any data collector for inaccuracies, which might have already impacted somebody's life.
Instead, you are being magnanimously allowed to increase the value of the data by correcting the mistakes.
For free.
If details of my life are a product, why am I not allowed to trademark it?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/depth-review-new-nsa-documents-expose-how-americans-can-be-spied-without-warrant
"The targeting document also exposes the government’s deceptive strategy to down-play their gigantic database of all the phone call records of Americans, obtained by misusing Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. They collect all information on who you call and how long the call lasts, but as President Obama emphatically stated "There are no names." Maybe not in that database, but the documents here shows that NSA also maintains a separate database of names, telephone numbers and other identifiers."
So be clear this is not anonymous meta data.
You could sue, but the NSA ignores client-lawyer privilege and collects that too.
You could run for President and sack the NSA chief, but he has your supporters list, your campaign strategy, a list of your backers, every mistake you've made, all the research you did, and probably the text of your speech before you say a word. Good luck with that democracy thing. BTW.
Boy, Kafka was ahead of his time.
Otherwise known as the "Fuck you, got mine" philosophy of political thought.
then you don't have to give up your info in exchange for the shiny. I no longer use any "free" services for me or my business and use a email with a domain the I registered just for that.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Well, that is your own fault. You should have told your parents to give you a different name.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Otherwise known as the fallacious bootstraps argument. Hard work =/= getting ahead.
Why would I want the Panopticon to have correct data? Improving the accuracy of the data would only make it more economically attractive to collect even more data.
No, I want the data to be as inaccurate as possible. If they give access to data it seems best to change any correct facts to inaccurate non-facts.
Why the hell would I want to do that?
I say lets inject even more noise into them. That won't matter if you're using the data for statistical purposes, and it gives some (alas, not much) plausible deniability for everything else.
-- Alastair
All this does is get the public to curate their own data that is being mined. Instead, the FTC should allow you to intentionally corrupt the data.
This.
In fact, it's perfectly legal (or at least, it used to be; who knows these days) to give false information or a false name as long as you're not trying to commit fraud. (Or impede justice; don't lie to the cops, just remain silent.)
-- Alastair
I agree with the other posts, Good Luck With That.
But a couple other thoughts come to mind -- as we know, credit reports are sometimes (notoriously) inaccurate. What a great way for the gov't and industry to get more accurate information about you, for their various reports and metrics, by recruiting YOU to correct it for them, free of charge?
I agree with the aforementioned broadcast in that ultimately, the credit report industry is a huge scam of sorts, benefiting only one side of the market. One day, I hope someone cracks that industry right open. Until then...
Abusive monopolies and massive quasi-governmental corporations practically fall into the same category as the state, so (little "L") libertarians would be opposed to them as well. Libertarianism doesn't exclude the use of regulation for the preservation of liberty. As the GP stated, there would still be laws concerning murder, etc.
Robber barons and feudal lords may be the poster child of (capital "L") Libertarianism, but not (lowercase "L") libertarianism.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
...Obama is even now stating explicitly that he wants "the middle class" to "stay there."
As opposed to letting them continue to slide as a class into poverty, yep.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I sometimes wonder how much junk mail bearing my name has been delivered to 1060 West Addison Street, :)
Chicago, Illinois 60613.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The most commonly ignored factor in most theories is human nature.
. After all, it's in many businesses interests to have accurate information
agreed.
I used to agree, but I'm not sure anymore that that's true of credit ratings. The correlation between credit rating and the probability of you paying back a loan is very poor. Furthermore what it takes to go from a very good credit rating to a poor one is surprisingly small, like a few late payments, and serious credit issues like having a house foreclosed on or not paying back a car loan don't seem to have a proportionately large effect. I strongly suspect that banks largely used credit ratings as an excuse to not give people the "loss leader" rates that they advertise.
And there's your fundamental flaw: since property is itself an artificial creation, there can be not exchange of it, no market, that does not involve artifice.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
...Obama is even now stating explicitly that he wants "the middle class" to "stay there."
As opposed to letting them continue to slide as a class into poverty, yep.
Oh, yes, can't "let" them move, can't "let" them get ahead, can't "let" them struggle, can't "let" anyone do anything to unbalance the status-quo, or challenge the elites that run everything. Already we have re-defined the "American Dream" - it now means "just getting by". Bread to eat, circuses to watch, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain...
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Otherwise known as the fallacious bootstraps argument. Hard work =/= getting ahead.
It'd be fallacious only if it weren't true. Sadly, in spite of your narrow and ill-informed view, hard work does indeed == getting ahead for many people every day all over the world.
And how does $BIGDATACO know that it is ME changing the data relating to me?
since property is itself an artificial creation
A given implementation of property rights has some artificial trappings, but even insects implement property rights by defending marked territories. Every animal has this idea hard-wired in. Heck, one could stretch the argument to walnut trees.
Georgists tend to ignore Nature in their search for an abstract ideal.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)