Monday, July 07, 2014

PERSONAL SECURITY - The Real Threat are Data Brokers, Not Government

"What do data brokers really know about us?" PBS NewsHour 7/6/2014

Excerpts

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Post Edward Snowdwn has the conversation changed, are more people aware now in the last year of not just NSA and the data that they’re gathering, but all the data of them that exists?

JULIA ANGWIN:  Yeah, I think people are more aware.  Although it still surprises me how much people are not aware.

It’s not just the NSA.  All these companies or even when you go to a shopping mall they might be setting up all these kind of WiFi sniffers that kind of ping your phone to see who is walking by, right?

The ubiquity of surveillance is really hard for people to grasp.
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HARI SREENIVASAN:  Do we as consumers have rights to look at the data that a commercial company might have on us and then dispute that, if that’s wrong?

JULIA ANGWIN:  No, we don’t have that right.  So we’re one of the only Western nations that doesn’t have a law that allows us to see the data, that commercial data gatherers have.

So must countries don’t let you see the data that intelligence agencies have, obviously.  But commercial data gatherers in most countries and Canada, and Europe, and the UK.  You can go to them and say, show me the information.  And if it’s wrong you can correct it, or ask for correction, and there’s sort of a dispute process.  But we don’t have that here.

So I tried to find where my data was.  I identified two hundred data brokers, and I was only able to see my files at 13 of them.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Of those 13, were they all accurate?

JULIA ANGWIN:  No, so that’s the other thing.  Of the 13 there were probably about 5 or 6 that were very accurate.

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