A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.

"The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago.

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members."

I thought that this was timely and relevant. Does federalization/decentralization solve these issues as we go into Web3? I’m newer to these ideas.

  • polygon@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, exactly this. While I’m somewhat uneasy that a huge corporation has a bunch of data on me the most they can do with it is spam me. When the government has the same data their power is orders of magnitude greater and who knows how what you may have said 10 years ago can be used against you now.

    There is a reason they’re not allowed to have this data without a warrant. Just because this data is for sale doesn’t mean they suddenly have the right to it. The power of the government is too great to trust with this, and we all know it, which is why those protections exist in the first place.

    • bouncing@partizle.comEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      IMO, this is also a reminder, however, that the US needs better privacy laws in general. It won’t always be just to spam you.

      Think about your buying habits and consider whether they might be useful to, say, an insurance broker.