from Hacker News

FTC Report Confirms: Commercial Surveillance Is Out of Control

by glitcher on 9/29/24, 3:38 PM with 153 comments

  • by myprotegeai on 9/29/24, 5:59 PM

    A company recently demoed to me that they have the ability to see the work history, credit report, and bank balance of a visitor that visits a site with some tracking code, in under 500ms. They use this information for a product that qualifies leads for sales teams, so the sales team knows who is a waste of time to go after and who isn't.

    Creeps me the fuck out, and the owners seem to have no ethical qualms about buying, selling, and using this data.

  • by agentultra on 9/29/24, 5:33 PM

    Finally. We all “know” that corporations will always choose profits over literally anything else. Glad to see the come back of the FTC. It seems we only get meaningful progress when there’s strong regulation.

    Other notable examples: the EPA. There was a time when people had to wear gas masks out doors in some cities because the pollution was so bad before regulations and enforcement came into place. Similar stories with CFC emissions.

    The development of the Internet has been accelerated under mostly conservative leadership which has been walking back regulations. And while much innovation has happened in that time I think a great deal more could have been achieved if it weren’t focused on this kind of profit-at-all-costs environment it’s been simmering in.

  • by glitcher on 9/29/24, 3:40 PM

  • by mrbluecoat on 9/29/24, 5:01 PM

    A four year investigation to tell us what we already know. The real question is: What is the federal government (or anyone else) going to do about it?

  • by fromMars on 9/29/24, 10:06 PM

    The information Credit Bureaus and Banks store is much scarier. They know your salary every place you've worked and lived. And with all the recent links anyone can find this information on the dark web.

  • by motohagiography on 9/29/24, 7:45 PM

    that horse left the barn over a decade ago. my attitude has changed to where I used to do security and privacy work to mitigate risk from a coming corporate cyberpunk dystopia, but now I think the idea of governments getting a monopoly on surveillance is the worst possible outcome.

    a real solution would be to legally privilege and disqualify classes of personal information from civil and non-violent criminal legal proceedings based on how they were collected, and PII collection sources material to commercial decisions must be disclosed in offers and contracts.

    insurers and creditors would actually have to take risk again instead of being rentiers, police are servants and not governors, and the provenance of PII as evidence would have to be proven as from a legal and prescribed source that included explicit consent. there is no stopping the flow of data collection, but we can improve laws to manage it.

  • by kristjank on 9/29/24, 9:25 PM

    I have become more and more inclined to deem the advertising industry considerably worse than the military industrial complex, and I hope that some higher force smites the executives involved with great vengeance and furious anger someday.

  • by t0bia_s on 9/29/24, 9:08 PM

    For me it's hypocrisy to regulate surveillance of private companies by state. You have option to not use their data collecting technologies. You cannot opt out to surveillance by state!

    Let's not play game to makes states good guys and companies the bad boys.

  • by oglop on 9/30/24, 3:25 PM

    You are not kept in the dark. This is not 2016. If you use these companies you know good and god damn well what they are doing. Grow up and take responsibility for using them, or delete your data and get off. Zero sympathy in 2024 for people shocked by this.

    Also, you don’t own your data. That idea is itself an absurdity that is already meaningless. Once that is accepted life becomes much simpler. You want stock growth and tech jobs, that’s part of the deal. I didn’t make it and I’m not responsible for it but that’s how it is.

  • by tsunamifury on 9/29/24, 6:31 PM

    This will make optimal global pricing an insane world where everything will cost the maximum you can pay but the overall system will collapse as people will consume way less and be more miserable within it.

  • by 29athrowaway on 9/29/24, 6:26 PM

    And what was the FTC doing all these years?

  • by lyu07282 on 9/30/24, 10:42 AM

    The microsecond Kamala is in office Lina Khan is axed, that's my election prediction.

  • by OneLeggedCat on 9/29/24, 5:48 PM

    > "While not every investigated company committed the same privacy violations, the conclusion is clear: companies prioritized profits over privacy. "

    Why wouldn't they? A capitalist shareholder system requires that they do exactly this, to whatever extent it does not impact sales.

    It's on citizens to demand regulation, and yet in the US, a probable majority of voting citizens don't like regulation, and think that government is too large or too untrustworthy. Combine that with the control that corporations have over our politicians, and further combine that with low public understanding of the issue, and there is nothing realistic that can be done.

    So I consider surveillance capitalism to be permanent in the US. Regardless of the fact that most people don't like being spied on and manipulated constantly. Perhaps some really large, really bad event could galvanize the public, but I doubt it.

  • by sanchezxa on 9/29/24, 7:15 PM

    Damn...

  • by OutOfHere on 9/29/24, 5:51 PM

    As true as that is, I think the people should still worry 100x more about government surveillance than about commercial surveillance. Commercial surveillance is only trying to sell you something you don't need. In contrast, government surveillance, with or without cooperation from commercial entities, is trying to lock you up for victimless crimes or on flimsy evidence because they have run out of real terrorists to fight. The government's data collection is vastly larger than of anyone else, all paid for by you with your taxes. Encryption, cybersecurity, and minimizing data retention are the primary ways to fight it.