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Is there such a thing as a data broker map?
(lemmy.world)
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I used to work for a data broker. The main problem here is that profiles are created and compiled from public data. There aren't any P.I.s at work here... Just massive amounts of data dumps that anyone could access. If you include PII data like socials, then there are limitations on who can view it.... But not really that hard to circumvent. A human could not possibly compile profiles from terrabytes of public data, but our programmers could.... And this is the real problem. much of this data was public before current computer logic existed and no one foresaw the huge privacy implications.
For my company, only requests that come from persons living in California were honored....and only the person could request removal, not a 3rd party on behalf of the person. Sux.
And FYI, any searches for certain people would be reported to the authorities.... Like if you searched Donald Trump with SSN Inclusion, we had to report it to secret service.
100% agree when you say "there aren't any PIs at work here", since we're talking about data aggregation from multiple sources. My thought is: given data aggregation of PII is largely legal, then equally, publishing of creative PII is also legal.
So, regularly feeding creative PII for obfuscation, for protection from unknown 3rd-parties, requires knowing the sources communicating your data. At least, the main sources.