This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our data. About us. Bought by our government. With tax money we gave them. How can I get a piece of this pie?
Yes, these companies they are buying from are getting rich off our tax money. Boycott Google? Not gonna happen. They just get your money indirectly.
You know… if the data is such that … they need to get a warrant… maybe these companies shouldn’t be able to collect it in the first place?
Yeah fuck that bullshit. They shouldn’t have been sold it without a warrant in the first place, either.
Edit: grammar
They shouldn't have been collected without a warrant
As I recall, a warrant is only relevant if they want to either ① gain access to stuff that you physically protect, or ② charge you with a crime. If they just wanna stick their noses in your digital crotch because you smell like a hottie terrorist, a warrant is not required.
Technically they need one to force a company to hand over data as well, but in this case they're not forcing anything. The issue here isn't the NSA buying the data, it's Google fucking selling it in the first place. We desperately need better data privacy laws. If Google couldn't sell the data, and ideally couldn't collect it in the first place, then the NSA would have nothing to buy and really would need a warrant.
To be clear, Google/Alphabet is not named in the article; which probably refers rather to military contractor companies such as Palantir.
Google doesn’t sell your data. That would eliminate their entire business model.
What Google sells is a platform with access to that data to target ads. They have the data, you have a target audience you want to advertise to, you pay them to make sure your ads reach your target with surgical precision.
See, when Conservatives spout their shit about small government, this is what they should be talking about. Massively scaling back the CIA and NSA operations so the average person doesnt need to worry about the government et al, snooping on them.
But no, they're much too worried about drag shows or something.
And also always want to increase the budget of the military and various alphabet agencies. It just seems blatantly hypocritical tbh
The ultimate solution to this (after we massacre a bunch of plutocrats) is to require a tightly constrained warrant for the state to use any data in order to convict someone of a crime, whether they buy it, get it from a willing third party (e.g. all the telecommunications services like AT&T and Verizon) or send a SWAT team to secure your computer gear at your own home. All these things should require a narrowly constrained warrant.
Right now, with much thanks to court precedent and SCOTUS gutting the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States, a lot of information is had by law enforcment without constraint, some of which comes from the NSA thanks to mission creep of the PRISM and XKeyscore projects. Since law enforcment routinely seizes liquid assets through asset forfeiture, the NSA will pass on tips to local precincts (Sheriffs, the TSA, etc.) who is travelling with too much cash, and the details of why they had to stop them and how they attained probable cause is determined later by the officers doing the seizing.
Every once in a while a tip is erroneous, and we get a team of ten or so officers seriously harassing some poor sod, or forcing deep cavity searches on some girl expected to be a mule, while the rest of us wonder why they're fixating on this innocent person while their chiefs allege we're in a crime wave (we aren't).
Much of the intelligence industrial complex that rose during the post 9/11/01 terrorism panic has been repurposed to track people travelling with too much money or too many liquidatable assets. And yes, if some sherrif is interested in your spouse or your lands or your fancy car, or getting your wrong-colored degernate family out of his county, utilizing the databases to find out where your nose isn't perfectly clean is routine.
So yes, the NSA has every reason to object to actual protections from the public regarding their spying, since they freely sell or trade intel for $$$$
I just wish they'd take me on a date first.
This just happened to a teen girl in Nebraska in that the police dept. bought her messenger chats from Facebook - from what I can understand.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2022/08/08/facebook-abortion-teen-dms/
https://www.thecut.com/2023/07/nebraska-mom-daughter-charges-illegal-abortion-facebook-chat.html
Literally from the first sentence of the first article...
"obtained her Facebook messages using a search warrant."
Second also references a search warrant affidavit.
Yea I know but further into it it mentioned purchasing
Not in the first article.
And second just mentions it's a possibility.
Look, I'm as against this as anyone. I think most people on Lemmy agree the big corporations have too much data on us and don't safeguard it's appropriately, but we don't need to pretend articles say something they don't.
This did not happen in the case you mentioned.
It's like everyone forgot about Edward Snowden and PRISM...
