At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy
This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks
Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.
Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.
Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/20/equifax-settles-with-ftc-cfpb-states-and-consumer-class-actions-for-700m/
Equifax's competitors are no better. Experian doxed the nation again, in 2021:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian
It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:
https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans
As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom
More than 650,000 of these categories exist, allowing advertisers to target substance abusers, depressed teens, and people on the brink of bankruptcy:
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you
These companies follow you everywhere, including to abortion clinics, and sell the data to just about anyone:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus
There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like Google and Meta, who are some of their best customers.
As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination – the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.
And now for some good news. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, has declared war on this alliance:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/16/cfpb-looks-to-restrict-the-sleazy-link-between-credit-reporting-agencies-and-data-brokers/
They've proposed new rules limiting the trade between brokers and bureaux, under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between the two:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/15/tech/privacy-rules-data-brokers/index.html
As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data – it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.
The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff
Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't – or shouldn't – use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
And it's true that privacy regulation faces stiff headwinds. Surveillance is a public-private partnership from hell. Cops and spies love to raid the surveillance industries' dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/ring-ring-lapd-calling/#ring
These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side. Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true "Deep State") and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.
Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling
I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?
But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.
I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
310 notes
·
View notes
my christmas gift to myself is finishing up my 80s wall street stockbroker hob x goth musician morpheus fic, at last. five thousand words and i think we've FINALLY got past the existentialism and onto the smut 😂
“Hmm.” Morpheus rests his cheek on the couch cushion. The tips of his hair brush Hob’s hip. His eyes are so liquid in this light. Hob wonders if he’s hallucinating.
He reaches out, mesmerized, to touch Morpheus’s hair. Morpheus doesn’t stop him. He lets Hob pet his hair, eyes falling shut. His hair is tacky on the ends with hair spray, but soft underneath.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Hob says, and Morpheus hums. “All those self-important traders trying to impress you with their convoluted financial instruments… they just want to hide that it’s all really a scam.”
“Is it now?” says Morpheus. “I was under the assumption it was legal.”
“Something can be a scam and technically legal. Oh, it’s all very clever. But it’s just building money on top of money with nothing real to support it. Kick out the base of the tower and it’ll all go into free fall.” He makes a whistling, falling sound, and Morpheus smirks.
“And I suppose you are better than all this.”
Hob chuckles. “Oh, no. I’m a money-grubbing little vermin, too. Just letting you in on the game. How it’s not so serious.”
“Hmm. I am a musician,” says Morpheus. As Hob figured, then. “I’m afraid it’s as serious as death.”
75 notes
·
View notes
advice for people just wanting to be educated in the finance field?
I would start dipping your toe in the finance sections of reputable sources (i.e. Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard business review, MarketWatch, etc.) and start researching terms and companies you don’t know. I treat myself with a Bloomberg Businessweek subscription sent to my home because I love their design team and it’s actually very informative. You can also sign up for the Morning Brew finance newsletter, it’s free and I read it every morning to get a brief overview of what’s going on. Even just being informed of current events is helpful in learning about finance because all major events effect the market and businesses. Look at stock performance charts. Learn about different types of investment accounts and different kinds of investments. There are a lot of really great courses on platforms like Coursera as well, I just took one called Private Equity & Venture Capital from Università Bocconi. Flirt with equity crowdfunding platforms (I accidentally made a lot of money on one of these as an early investor with less than $1k). If you live in the US start looking into personal and business tax deductions. Even credit card rewards can actually get you a lot, I’ve gotten free hotel rooms and free flights from money I would have spent anyway. Investments also mean more than just individual stocks: could be index funds, mutual funds, bonds, CDs, REITs, forex, precious gems & metals, real estate, even some designer goods retain and increase in value if bought strategically and handled correctly. Even just having the fundamentals of a maxed out retirement account (a Roth IRA or a backdoor Roth IRA is my personal preference) full of index funds and mutual funds that are balanced well, a fully funded emergency fund of 3-12 months personal expenses, any debt above 7% interest paid off, and sinking funds for various expenses automatically set up in a high yield savings account will have you very well off. When you have a foundation like that you have the breathing room to change careers, take time off, buy investment properties, invest in volatile but potentially profitable ventures, start businesses, and set up additional streams of income.
150 notes
·
View notes