Perhaps most controversially, the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information, a newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, ODNI, reveals. Were the government to simply demand access to a device’s location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge’s sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”
Here’ tge report (pdf): https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf
That’s what I thought, too. If the police needs a judge’s sign-off as collecting such data without a warrant would violate the Fourth Amendment, why then are private companies allowed to do so? I’m not a lawyer, but this is strange to me. As a legal layman I would say that private companies and data brokers are violating the law, right?
I’m not a lawyer either, but from my understanding, this relates to third party doctrine. Since we willingly provide this information to a third party, we therefore have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
It is long past time that the United States passed laws to address these deficiencies. If our intelligence services are buying this data, you can be certain foreign governments and their intelligence services are doing the same.
We should spend less time focusing on Tik Tok bans and more time addressing the root cause of the issue.
Im also a legal layman, but my understanding is that the 4th amendment protects you from this kind of data collection from the government, not from corporations. Shouldn’t be that way IMO though
Read the report, it covers the legal basis they are using and why warrant protections don’t apply. The “publicly available information can’t be sensitive personal information” justification has basically allowed them to buy what would otherwise require actual warrant processes.
I think they read the report; they’re saying that corporations shouldn’t be able to sell that information in the first place, to anyone. The government can’t use the “it’s publicly available information” excuse if nobody else can legally collect it to sell it to the gov and other corpertions. (Aka, they can’t “make it publicly available.”)
People are arguing that if it’s illegal for the gov to collect the info directly, it should also be illegal for a corporation to collect and/or sell that info directly, thus closing the loophole.
The thing is that corporations already can’t sell that data … unless you give them permission to … which you do just that explicitly when you agree to the EULAs.
That’s the legal basis. No one absolutely must use these platforms, legally. Practically they must in many cases but that’s the catch 22. The platforms literally came up on intelligence community funding. Facebook was propped up by’em for this exact reason.
And you can’t make an inalienable right to privacy such that companies can’t ever sell personal data but still allow people themselves to do so, and you can’t stop me from selling my data myself. That would be a much bigger breach of the contract of regulatory power that defends citizens.
Privacy isn’t something anyone can reasonably force you to keep. I can’t go showing my dick to everyone and then scold them for checking out my package, and still maintain my honesty. If I didn’t want people looking at my wangstick, I wouldn’t show it to them.