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This Company Has Built a Profile On Every American Adult (bloomberg.com)
Reader schwit1 writes: Every move you make. Every click you take. Every game you play. Every place you stay. They'll be watching you. IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company's database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn't waiting for requests from clients -- it's already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn't be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. 'We have data on that 21-year-old who's living at home with mom and dad,' he says.
Ironic. The link to the article begins by complaining about my use of an ad blocker in my browser. So what was newsworthy about that article again? Shameless linking of online behaviour and personality profile? You wonder how they got all that data.
If I put up a chart of someone's activities, they call me a stalker, but if a company does it, it is called smart business. 2 sets of rules. Greed is great. Fuck me moar.
I have a different idea. I think Congress should pass a law saying such information always remains your property, and that every access of it for the purposes of making profit by any authorized entity must see you paid 50% of the gross revenue generated. Unauthorized access sees you paid 95%. Lack of payment by any company is regarded as theft, and will be prosecuted as a criminal offense.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Unauthorized access sees you paid 95%.
Make that 5000% and we can start talking about there being some downsides to tracking (for the tracker).
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Within the past few years, some former college football and basketball players sued the NCAA successfully. For over a decade, officially licensed college football and basketball games were produced by EA Sports. The games didn't include player names but the uniform numbers, positions, physical attributes, and player skills, which were clearly derived from the real athletes. No names or actual player photos were used, but the court still decided that everything else constituted an unauthorized use of the likeness of players, who had not licensed that use. Because EA Sports and the NCAA used that information for profit without license from the players, the court decided they were entitled to compensation. If this company is profiting by selling profiles of people they have built without a license from those people, it still seems to be an unauthorized use of a person's likeness. I'm not sure new legislation is required, just for someone to test this idea in court with existing laws.
Yeah, as usual this is just another hyped-up clickbait summary. When you read TFA, you find that what they actually claim to have is:
All KNOWN addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses (jeez, they know stuff they know)
Propery bought and sold, including mortgages (public records stuff)
Vehicles owned (public records)
Criminal record (public records)
Voter registration (public records)
Hunting permits (public records)
They also claim to have 'biilions of photographs from private companies with license plate scanners'. Kind of doubtful, companies don't give that info away for free, and why would they buy it if they don't need it.
Oh, and the 'every purchase' bullshit? Well, they own a couple of coupon companies, and IF you sign up for their coupons they ask for stuff like email and birthday, and IF you use those coupons when you buy something they know what you bought. No shit.
See headline, think to myself, "Hmm, I used to know people in this industry." Continue reading, "The Boca Raton, Fla., company's database..." Oh, shit. That's where I was when I knew them. Please don't be somebody I know. Please don't be somebody I know. "Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says". FUUUUCKKKKKK. Oddly, though, I don't know him from this industry but rather from a company in another industry that I worked with him at.
On a serious note, some insider information. First, yes, they do in fact know that much about you and yes the tools work incredibly well. I worked on the product that became the NSA's PRISM program (after I was no longer working on it). Believe it or not, it actually started out as a marketing tool to find potential leads. After 9/11, the company's owner Hank Asher realized that it would work well for tracking and researching people for the feds. The tool could query incredibly detailed information on anybody in the US with sub-second response times... in the year 2000. No off the shelf tools like hbase existed back then to do something like this.
About the only way to stay under the radar with this kind of stuff and not be homeless is to have a mailbox at someplace like the UPS Store, get paid under the table and pay cash for everything, and move around every 2 months without any written lease. After that, your new location gets fed into these systems. The time to stay at one place may actually be shorter these days.