According to a recently declassified report, the US government is buying citizens’ personal information. This should come as no surprise, as this had been reported before, but now we’re hearing that agencies like the FBI are buying this data.
This report comes from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (ODNI). This report confirms that government agencies are buying “commercially available information”.
This data comes from devices like smartphones, connected cars, IoT devices, web tracking technologies like cookies and much more. Some of the data that is obtained includes location information, web browsing activity and social media information.
Commercially Available Information or CAI, can often reveal the “detailed movements and associations of individuals and groups, revealing political, religious, travel and speech activities.” It is also able to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.”
What is surprising here is that the government is basically admitting to this.
The data is often anonymized
While the data is often anonymized, it is possible to use other forms of commercially available information to identify Americans. The report does also acknowledge that some of this information that can be acquired can be subject to abuse, as is any type of information.
While this report is pretty scary, it is not a surprise in the least. The FBI having access to the same sort of data as Google and Facebook, should not surprise anyone, but it should scare everyone. This is why we need to have some serious privacy improvements, and currently, Apple is really the only one taking steps to help with privacy. And that’s mostly because they are the only tech giant that doesn’t have a huge ad business.
These tech giants collect all of this data to use for ads. Being able to better target ads means that they can charge more for ads, and the advertisers get more clicks on their ads. Which is what both the tech giants and advertisers want.