People don't grasp how easy it is to build data models like this even without privileged first-party data access.
In 2012 I created a killer prototype that demonstrated that you could accurately reconstruct most people's flight history at scale from social media and/or ad data. Probably the first of its kind. This has been possible for a long time.
A quick sketch of how it worked:
We filtered out all spatiotemporal edges in the entity graph with an implied speed of <300 kilometers per hour or <200 kilometers distance, IIRC. This was the proxy for "was on a plane". It also implicitly provided the origin and destination.
These edges can be correlated with both public flight data and maintenance IoT data from jet engines to put entities on a specific flight. People overlook the extent to which innocuous industrial IoT data can be used as a proxy for relationships in unrelated domains.
In rare cases, there was more than one plausible commercial flight. Because we had their flight history, we assumed in these cases that it was the primary airline they had used in the past, either generally or for that specific origin and destination. This almost always resolved perfectly.
This was impressively effective and it didn't require first-party data from airlines or particularly sophisticated analytics. Space and time are the primary keys of reality.
gruez · 4h ago
>We filtered out all spatiotemporal edges in the entity graph with an implied speed of <300 kilometers per hour or <200 kilometers distance, IIRC. This was the proxy for "was on a plane". It also implicitly provided the origin and destination.
Sounds like the bigger issue is that you're able to get "spatiotemporal" data in the first place? Otherwise it's like saying "we can figure out all stores you've been to, if we have your credit card transaction history". Sure, it's kinda creepy that you can figure out which stores I went to, but the bigger problem is that you can get the transaction data in the first place. Moreover whatever "spatiotemporal" data needed to reconstruct such flight history is probably more valuable than the flight history itself. Who cares if you know Joe flew on United 8340 when you have hour-by-hour updates on his rough location?
AnthonyMouse · 2h ago
> Otherwise it's like saying "we can figure out all stores you've been to, if we have your credit card transaction history".
The preposterous thing is that payment processors aren't just allowed to collect this information and tie it to your name, they're required to do that.
People talk a big game about fighting fascism, but how can you allow these laws to exist if you can contemplate what happens when actual fascists get hold of that data going back decades? They need to be dismantled now.
bigfatkitten · 41m ago
Even if they weren’t required to do it, they would do it anyway because it’s an important part of fraud detection.
charcircuit · 2h ago
Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals.
AnthonyMouse · 1h ago
> Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws is not a convincing argument to me. It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals.
I find this view to be lacking in nuance.
Laws are intended to exist with the consent of the governed. Substantially the whole of society agrees that murder should be illegal, so if someone commits murder we're willing to commit significant resources to investigating and prosecuting the perpetrator. It doesn't have to be efficient or have perfect enforcement because its purpose is to act as a deterrent. Everyone is willing to spend the resources to enforce those laws because everyone agrees that their enforcement is important. Enforcement efficiency is not required when there is popular consent.
Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. When there is a law against being of a particular ethnicity or religion or political ideology, you want to enable people to be criminals. Preventing laws like that from ever being effective is worth sustaining a significant amount of inefficiency in the enforcement of other laws.
And this is not a binary distinction with "laws against murder" on one side and "laws against being Jewish" on the other. The latter is only the viscerally powerful extreme that once made us say never again.
The spectrum spans the full scale, where the middle is filled with police corruption and political retaliation against the opposition and petty busybodies inducing poverty and homelessness through the incompetent micromanagement of society.
Should governments have the ability to freeze the bank accounts of protesters? It doesn't matter what they're protesting or what crimes some minority of the protesters are alleged to have committed when the account freezes are instituted as collective punishment, the answer is no. The government should not have the ability to do that, because in that case they are the criminals, and structural defenses against government abuses are important.
avidiax · 1h ago
> It sounds like you want to enable people to be criminals.
Yes, wherever it is criminal to improve the wellbeing or support progress of society, I support the ability of people to be criminals.
Rosa Parks wasn't allowed to sit at the front of the bus. Criminal.
I doubt MLK had a permit for every march. Criminal.
I doubt the founding fathers were legally allowed to oppose the British taxes. Criminals.
A society with no crime is a dystopia.
magicalist · 2h ago
> Arguing that we shouldn't do something because it would make it harder to enforce laws
If you want to do it, get a warrant.
vdqtp3 · 2h ago
At this point in human history, is it relevant to the individual whether someone is a criminal? What matters is whether they've injured someone else.
To use the US as an example (I doubt other countries are much better) it's estimated that every adult in the US commits multiple Federal felonies per day[1], Federal law is replete with ridiculous laws[2] and the number of federal laws is uncountable by Congressional Research Service staff. Does it matter at that point?
Is a statistical analysis of the specific number actually the point? Suppose it was three felonies a year. What difference does that make when the prison sentence for each felony is also at least a year? The problem is the same; a prosecutor can throw anyone in prison simply because there are so many laws nobody can follow them all or even realize when they're violating one.
gruez · 1h ago
You can check the rest of the thread, but I'm not even convinced that the median person commits 3 crimes a year. Maybe there's an average of 3 felonies per day/month/year if you count all the small businesses that aren't complying with federal product/safety regulation to the letter (thus dragging up the average), but I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year.
axus · 28m ago
Yeah I agree, though include "knowingly employing unauthorized immigrants" in those averages.
Exceeding the driving speed limit is more of an "infraction" and not a crime until it becomes reckless.
pesus · 1h ago
> I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year.
Someone who smokes weed daily in a place where it's illegal could easily commit multiple crimes a day just for drug possession and consumption, for example.
gruez · 1h ago
Only 16% of Americans marijuana, according to Gallup. If you exclude people who are in states where it's legal/decriminalized, that'd probably be even lower. Needless to say, even if all 16% of them are criminals, that's far from the median person committing 3 felonies. Moreover the weed example isn't not even applicable to thesis of the book or the commenter that invoked it, which is that the US has so many regulations that nobody can hope to comply with them.
vdqtp3 · 59m ago
> If you exclude people who are in states where it's legal/decriminalized
There is no state where cannabis derivatives are federally legal.
> Maybe there's an average of 3 felonies per day/month/year if you count all the small businesses that aren't complying with federal product/safety regulation to the letter (thus dragging up the average), but I can't think how realistically the average joe is committing 3 felonies per year.
To begin with, let's not ignore how broad a category "small business" is. Laws requiring health inspections or licenses etc. often operate on the basis of frequency or number of patrons. If you have around a dozen people over for movie night every Saturday with the event published on social media and you all chip in for pizza, are you a food service business? For that matter, is that a public performance in violation of copyright?
If some criminals break into one of your devices or your personal website while you're traveling and you find out about it while you're out of state but don't have time to deal with it until you get back home, have you committed a crime? What if they put some illegal materials there and you clean off the device but still have a backup containing the illegal materials? What if you do delete all of them right away; is that destruction of evidence? What if there's a federal law against keeping the materials and a state law against destruction of evidence and a very specific way to comply with both of them at the same time that may not have been clearly decided by the appellate court when it was happening but has been decided by the time they bring the case against you? What if it was clear ahead of time but wasn't intuitive and you can't afford a lawyer and can't have one appointed until after you've been charged?
It's unreasonable to expect ordinary people to be able to navigate this.
gruez · 15m ago
>To begin with, let's not ignore how broad a category "small business" is. Laws requiring health inspections or licenses etc. often operate on the basis of frequency or number of patrons. If you have around a dozen people over for movie night every Saturday with the event published on social media and you all chip in for pizza, are you a food service business? For that matter, is that a public performance in violation of copyright?
That's what courts are for. I don't think there's any case where people tried to prosecute a shared movie night as a business, because it'd be laughed out of court. Same goes for whether it's copyright infringement or not. Moreover if you look at how authoritarian regimes work in practice, dissents are often prosecuted under national security laws, campaign finance violations, or libel laws, not because they violated the health code by having a movie night.
jandrewrogers · 55m ago
> Sounds like the bigger issue is that you're able to get "spatiotemporal" data in the first place?
Almost all data is spatiotemporal data, people just aren't used to thinking about it like that. Everything that "happens" is an event with associated times and places.
Tagging of events with spatiotemporal attributes, or with metadata that can be used to infer spatiotemporal attributes, is pervasive. Every system data passes through, even if not the creator of it, observes the event of the data passing through it. Event observation is not trying to track things but it implicitly and necessarily creates the data that makes tracking and spatiotemporal inference possible.
These kinds of analyses rely almost entirely on knowing the events occurred; you could encrypt the contents of the data and it wouldn't matter. Software leaks spatiotemporal event context everywhere across myriad systems, internal and external, that incidentally collect it. There isn't anything nefarious about most of it and much of it is required for reasons of criminal and civil liability.
What people underestimate is that you can analytically stitch together many unrelated sparse data sources with spatiotemporal attributes, many of which are quite crap or seemingly unfit for purpose, to reconstruct a dense high-quality graph. Counter-intuitively, diverse and seemingly irrelevant data sources often produce better data models. It surfaces bias, errors, manipulation, and processing artifacts in individual sources you might otherwise miss.
It is much more difficult to access the obvious first-party data sources than it used to be, mostly because people with that data are far more selective about who they give access. It doesn't really matter, that is a speed bump for the unsophisticated. The exponential growth in the scale and diversity of network-connected telemetry of all types pretty much guarantees these data models will always be constructible.
The historical limiter has always been the absence of data infrastructure platforms that can handle these kinds of analytics at scale.
throawayonthe · 3m ago
but it's obviously very easy ro get from social media? e.g. you have a post from paris and then later that day a post from brussels
magicalist · 3h ago
> Sounds like the bigger issue is that you're able to get "spatiotemporal" data in the first place?
Yeah, this just sounds like it's written from the perspective of a data broker.
Tying particular ad analytics (presumably ip geolocation?) to thousands of particular individuals and having it well populated enough to track them is "privileged first-party data access" by another name.
const_cast · 2h ago
Your location is leaked in many, many ways. Even if you have location services off on your phone, the first-party (Google, Apple) has access to your precise location. On Android, this bypasses VPNs, and I believe on iOS/Mac first-party apps also bypass VPNs. You are trusting that this data is not leaked to any third-parties. You cannot verify this, as the data is exfiltrated to servers which you can't verify.
Okay, fine, I'll just install another operating system then, like KDE plasma mobile or GrapheneOS. Your location is still leaked 24/7. This is because your cellular modem has it's own operating system, running underneath your phone's operating system, which is triangulating your location at all times. Once again, you are trusting that telecommunications companies aren't misusing this - but please remember they're complied, by law, to make a lot of this information available to numerous third parties.
Okay fine, let me just remove the Sim then and use my phone on Wifi only, always through a VPN. Your location is still being leaked potentially, for example, by your car. Your car also has a cellular modem which leaks your location, and you probably signed a contract allowing that data to be given to hundreds of third-parties.
Of course, all of this is assuming you don't use any social media. Social media can also leak your location, even without location services. If you review a restaurant - that's your location. Where are your friends? You're probably around them. And on and on.
gruez · 2h ago
>On Android, this bypasses VPNs
source?
>You are trusting that this data is not leaked to any third-parties. You cannot verify this, as the data is exfiltrated to servers which you can't verify.
At least on Android you can theoretically disable "google location accuracy" which stops it sending nearby hotspot mac addresses to Google. That's the only public route where google gets your location without you knowingly sending to it. You also imply that mobile operating systems are surreptitiously sending locations back to google/apple even if users have all location related features disabled, but I'm not aware of any evidence this is the case, and this falls into same category as "facebook is secretly listening to you" territory until proven otherwise.
magicalist · 2h ago
I mean you're saying a lot for rhetorical effect, but it doesn't get around the fact that there aren't that many avenues to reliably collect this data, with high enough resolution and tied to identity, for thousands/millions of individuals, and if you do have that data, you're basically a data broker. I mean, yes, all those things are true, and they're pooled together and available for sale by data brokers.
It's also disappointing that the root comment is distracting from the 4th amendment violations by making the conversation about their vague claims of selling mini-palantir demos through abusing web ads.
jandrewrogers · 16m ago
The assumption that the data must be "high resolution" is erroneous. Low resolution noisy data works just fine, you just need a lot more of it. You can use standard signal processing tricks such as stacking noisy low-resolution data to extract high-resolution features. This requires a lot more processing but that isn't much of a limitation. These reconstruction techniques work even if the data is from unrelated sources that aren't even trying to measure the thing you are measuring.
Any data exhaust will work, people have created interesting PoCs leveraging things like HVAC data, RF attenuation, etc. High-precision weather models essentially work the same way, making inferences by stitching together diverse event data that has nothing to do with weather.
High-quality high-resolution data sources largely don't exist in the way people imagine they do, so you need to do this anyway. If you have a high-resolution spatiotemporal graph for entities, tying it to identity is always trivial.
It would be more common if it weren't for the fact that open source platforms scale poorly for this type of analytical processing.
jandrewrogers · 48m ago
Anyone could have acquired this data the time, it was all either free or cheap. Like I said, my business was specialized data infrastructure (e.g. storage engines and analytical parallel processing), we just used these data sources for testing and demos because "free or cheap".
I also have a lot of experience with privileged first-party data but that is governed by a different set of rules and is often regulated. You have to be much more circumspect about how you use it.
Even though it might be convenient to e.g. slurp telemetry off a mobile carrier's backbone, what you eventually realize is the inability to do this isn't a real limitation and in some ways is a blessing in disguise.
gmueckl · 1h ago
Twitter has had timestamped amd geotagged posts for ages. Just clustering things like hashtags of tweets spatiotemporally results in a treasure trove if information about events.
I'm sure that other platforms attach the same kind of info to posts. It's just a matter of scraping it.
noman-land · 4h ago
Where do you get "maintenance IoT data from jet engines"?
jszymborski · 2h ago
Indeed, seems like it's way easier to just got the databroker route.
supportengineer · 3h ago
Exactly. This does not pass the sniff test.
tqi · 4h ago
Presumably ICE is trying to determine what cities / countries a person has visited and when, ie your starting point.
bsder · 3h ago
> People don't grasp how easy it is to build data models like this even without privileged first-party data access.
People on this site probably understand this better than 99% of the world.
The problem is "What can I, as an individual, do about it?"
autoexec · 3h ago
block ads, stay off most social media, don't use mobile devices while traveling
rs186 · 32m ago
> don't use mobile devices while traveling
Some airlines don't even allow you to check in without using their app, unless you are willing to pay for a fee.
Den_VR · 3h ago
You can also exploit it for personal profit. As for stopping it, good luck. Best case is probably to degrade or poison data sources in a preferably legal way.
no_wizard · 4h ago
What was your accuracy rate for this? I imagine it was quite high, but do you happen to remember what your +/- was?
justanything · 5h ago
Can you eli5 the implementation and how your prototype worked?
gleenn · 5h ago
Sounds like if you have a record of a lot of location/timestamp data for people, you look at the distance difference divided by the time difference. Now you have average speed for any pair of points. Now filter where the average speed is as fast as a Boeing jet. That filters out most of the data except for people who are almost certainly on a plane. Et voila, you now look at those data points geolocation and you have people who traveled from one city to another because you already have the location. Compare City1 -> City2 with any public flights in those cities around those times and you know who flew on what flight from where to where and at what time.
timeon · 3h ago
I'm more interested in this part:
> you have a record of a lot of location/timestamp data for people
What is the source of that data?
jacobr1 · 3h ago
from the parent post: `social media and/or ad data`
So if you have ad impression data you have IP geolocation, or maybe better, along with the timestamp. Similarly for socials sometimes you get location metadata, and with image uploads you can can get location metadata (though today these are often stripped, historically they weren't).
wingspar · 5h ago
Honestly asking,
How did you validate your results?
jandrewrogers · 4h ago
In this particular case it was just a proof-of-concept, albeit at scale. We did not run a proper ground-truthing process but people actually running that type of data model in production could have ground-truthed the analytic model if they wanted to.
However, it turns out that thousands of people like to talk about their flights on social media, so we scraped that as a spot check and it mostly lined up perfectly. Good enough for a demo and it would have been difficult to come up with an alternative explanation for the patterns in the data.
The purpose of the PoC was to sell the data analysis infrastructure that made that type analysis possible at scale, it wasn't about the data per se. It was a compelling demo we invented given the data that happened to be available. Startup life.
jcranmer · 4h ago
> Good enough for a demo and it would have been difficult to come up with an alternative explanation for the patterns in the data.
For fun edge cases, there's always Antarctica, where you can travel from a US base (which looks like you're in the US) to a NZ base (which looks like you're in NZ) in a couple of minutes: https://brr.fyi/posts/credit-card-shenanigans
fsckboy · 5h ago
i don't have any special knowledge in this area, but just thinking about it idly while sitting here, "robbing their homes while they are away" comes to mind as a good proxy.
animal_spirits · 4h ago
Reminds me of this news story of footballer John Terry who's house was robbed because he posted a picture of him on holiday. The insurance company tried to use a 'reasonable care' clause of home insurance to deny his insurance claim.
FYI the source you posted never claimed that John Terry's insurance tried to deny the claim, only mentioning that "some" insurance companies warn of it. However even that claim is questionable, because it isn't even from an insurance company, it's from a content marketing piece by an insurance comparison website.
0cf8612b2e1e · 2h ago
Wouldn’t that mean all celebrities are uninsurable? If politician/singer/athlete has a public away event, there is little they can do to obscure that fact.
iterance · 4h ago
That seems like a risk, but not a validation method, unless you are feeling particularly bold.
wingspar · 4h ago
Basically a plot line on the show “Black List”. Had an inside guy at the post office who would forward people stopping mail delivery on vacation. Then used homes as safe houses.
canadiantim · 3h ago
Great info
btown · 4h ago
It's funny to see ARC just being described as a "data broker," which strongly implies that it doesn't play a role in facilitating the actual underlying consumer activity.
ARC and IATA absolutely do play such a role, as the financial clearinghouses for ensuring that travel agents (online and offline) and airlines can pay each other, and as gatekeepers/certification bodies for agencies to ensure these financial systems aren't abused.
Now, they absolutely do sell access to data to third parties, governmental and nongovernmental. But the reason they have this data isn't because they buy it to resell it; they are fully part of the funds flow for the underlying transaction. Whether they should be allowed to sell or share non-anonymized data on passenger records and prices paid is a very good question, but at the very least this is about as first-party as data gets.
The amount and extent of data that is available out there by brokers for purchase by literally any company is *mind-boggling*. However bad you think it is, multiply that by 10.
trollied · 5h ago
A colleague created a banner ad that was an image that had the text “told you I could do this mate!” and targeted an individual to prove a point.
The general public have no idea how much ad providers and data brokers know about them.
rvnx · 4h ago
Seems just like retargeting in that case. Ask “victim” to visit page A. On that page A place a retargeting pixel, then now everywhere on the Internet you can display a message for that user as long as you are willing to pay a high price for that impression (high price is way way way less than 0.1 USD)
lyton · 1h ago
Reminds me of the time when Signal(the private messaging app) once tried to get ad data from Facebook and show it to users with a high degree of specificity eg “You got this ad because you’re a middle aged woman who enjoys kpop and loves reading about Christopher Nolan”
Around 2014 I worked with recruiters and they had a tool that aggregated data on everyone through LinkedIn, yelp, twitter, GitHub, eventbrite, etc. it was breathtaking the amount of information you could get on anyone, over 10+ years ago.
I’m guessing with the help of Palantir, the government has even more data and can probably link Reddit posts etc based on styleometry and can even perform psychological analysis on your personality and tendencies, etc.
kevin_thibedeau · 4h ago
The government has been buying and funding R&D with data brokers since before Google existed.
worik · 4h ago
> it was breathtaking the amount of information you could get on anyone, over 10+ years ago.
After being burnt by things taken from my social media out of context, used to publicly shame me, I locked down my social media
Am I "sweetly naive" to think that had an effect? I do think it did
Before I stopped using Facebook I noticed, over the last decade, that almost every account I encountered was locked down similarly
My point is I suspect it is getting harder, not easier, for data thieves. The golden age of data theft has passed. Maybe.
JohnMakin · 6h ago
I work in this space - I'd say 1000x.
OsrsNeedsf2P · 6h ago
Could you elaborate with specifics? If it's this bad, why haven't we heard anything from a whistleblower or seen a good demo?
JohnMakin · 5h ago
Because none of it is really unknown? People know about it and don't care. Hell, even people on this forum that should know better and care that don't, or think when they hear about stuff like this it's FB pixel or google analytics stuff. The simple fact is with a few basic pieces of information on somebody, there's almost nothing that is sacred or not for sale. People mistakenly believe they're protected by adblockers and stuff, or by avoiding social media, but the simple fact is that it is unavoidable while simply existing and the 1000x comment is from my POV the scale of it is astounding and growing every year and people really don't have a good understanding of the subtle and not subtle ways it can affect you, or when told, don't care/dismiss it. So I don't really feel anymore like explaining it. If more people understood, I'd also stand to profit quite a bit from it, so that's where my frustrated tone is coming from.
genghisjahn · 5h ago
I'm pretty sure it was over when we switched to debit/credit cards. Everywhere you go, how much you buy, all that stuff has been sold for quite a while now.
const_cast · 2h ago
No, it was before this, with phone lines and wiretapping because forcibly allowed by law. As soon as we said "okay, you're allowed to record stuff if it's for a good purpose", it was over.
chgs · 5h ago
People voluntarily used loyalty cards well before then.
hnlmorg · 1h ago
I remember when loyalty cards first came to England. There were consumer rights shows on TV devoting entire episodes to the evils of their spying.
It’s amazing how much worse things have gotten, yet how people seem to care less now than they used to.
I wonder if it’s just consumers being so overwhelmed by their lack of control that they’ve become apathetic to the problem as a whole.
dingnuts · 4h ago
cash is tracked as well, it's been over for a long time.
each bill has a serial # and it gets scanned going in and out of the bank. Yes, it's still marginally easier to launder cash but if you just take it out of the ATM and spend it at a store it'll get tracked accurately
genghisjahn · 4h ago
I don't think this is as accurate as you are making out. Wawa (a connivence store in the Philly area) isn't tracking each $10 that goes in and out of the register. It could float all over the city before hitting a bank, and even then banks typically track serial numbers for large demonizations and we when there's a suspicion of illegal activity. Happy to learn more about this if I have it wrong.
codyb · 4h ago
How would one find out what data brokers knew from their cash purchases?
Do banks sell this information? This bill was pulled from this ATM in Georgia by one Claudius McMoneyhands, and then deposited by one CashMoneyBusiness LLC in South Carolina three weeks later
Seems like there could still be intermediaries and a lack of what you actually bought with it at least?
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 · 3h ago
Oh boy, don't give them any more ideas. This would work.
asdff · 3h ago
Grocery store lets you draw $200 cashback out of their register.
svieira · 3h ago
My favorite example is the story about a data broker who, the day after 9/11 happened went from the name "Muhammad" to a list of ~1K people which included 1 out of 4 of the 9/11 terrorists.
I'm aware that using adblockers and avoiding social media doesn't entirely prevent tracking, shadow profiles, and such, but surely it makes things more difficult for these companies, no? Or would you say that there's practically no difference between making an effort to preserve one's privacy and just giving up entirely?
jancsika · 4h ago
> the subtle and not subtle ways it can affect you
In Manufacturing Consent they measured column inches in the NYT-- IIRC it was something like measuring the total that support the relevant U.S. administration's official position on given policy vs. inches that went against the gov't position. In any case, they were measuring column inches.
What were you measuring to come to your conclusion?
JohnMakin · 1h ago
I don't really understand the point of this comment.
sixothree · 5h ago
I really don't think they "know". They have an idea. But they really don't understand any sort of extent or implication.
If the FTC could do anything here to make this situation better, it would be to give every person access to any data about them that gets sold.
roadside_picnic · 5h ago
I could give you some great horror stories, but honestly I don't see the benefit in either potentially harming former coworkers of mine that still work at those places or ending myself in some sort of career/legal trouble for something people generally don't care about (other than a few points on HN).
If you were caught demoing something both horrific and internal you would risk serious damage to your career, and ultimately will have zero impact on the industry as there's just too much data out there and too much money wrapped up in it.
Plus, most people working with the data don't bother to look at it. The places I've internally demo'd massive privacy risks were shocked because they didn't realize what their own data was capable of. Most people are just writing jobs that run and shuffle data around from one place to another never really asking "what is this data?" Even among data scientists I'm routinely surprised (so maybe I shouldn't be surprised) how frequently data scientist never do any real error analysis by looking at what the model got wrong and trying to understand why.
rapind · 6h ago
We hear about it all the time but no one cares.
seplox · 6h ago
I guess you were just distracted by all of the other house-on-fire crap going on.
Among the additional information Kochava collects and sells are non-anonymized individual home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, gender, age, ethnicity, yearly income, “economic stability,” marital status, education level, political affiliation and “interests and behaviors,” compiling and selling dossiers on individuals marketed as offering a “360-degree perspective,” the FTC said.
...
According to the FTC, Kochava’s data can identify women who visit reproductive clinics by name and address along with, for example, when they visit particular buildings, their names, email and home addresses, number of children, race and app usage.
...
Kochava marketing materials tell customers it offers “rich geo data spanning billions of devices globally” and that its location data feed “delivers raw latitude/longitude data with volumes around 94B+ geo-transactions per month, 125 million monthly active users, and 35 million daily active users, on average observing more than 90 daily transactions per device.”
...
The complaint also alleges that the company has lax procedures for determining who it is selling data to, saying purchasers are allowed to use a generic personal email address, label an alleged company as “self” and explain they plan to use the data for “business.”
I was on a team of about 25 involved in pitching a particularly large deal to a public sector client (think US state/local governments). The audience was about 50 people from different departments and agencies throughout the state and our pitch team consisted of about 6-8 very big shots + me the computer nerd. During our prep and rehearsals a "look book" was distributed which consisted of write ups on each person expected to be in the audience. It was very detailed with a career and education history of each person, a personality analysis, where their interests/passions lie both at work and personally, and what topics and key points set them off. The deck was very professional and not something thrown together, i was impressed but a little taken aback too.
astura · 5h ago
Cuz it's not really unknown nor is it illegal.
I know someone who bought the address of everyone with a specific first name.
timeon · 3h ago
> nor is it illegal
Where I live it is.
astura · 2h ago
I simply don't believe you that all data brokers are completely and entirely illegal where you live.
Melatonic · 5h ago
Anyway to combat it or stop your info from being overly harvested?
southernplaces7 · 5h ago
I asked this same thing in another comment here, but since you mention working in this space, I ask you directly. Where do the brokers obtain their data from? If it's easy for them to obtain, would those who buy it from brokers not be able to simply get it from its respective sources? I'm genuinely curious about how this dynamic works.
jeffbee · 6h ago
I would say that in general the HN crowd doesn't understand the industry at all, and they need to change the direction of their understanding, rather than the magnitude. Your basic hackernews believes that e.g. Google is out there selling all your personal information. But compared to these other industries the tech industry is almost airtight. It has long been possible for someone to pick up the phone and order, in any format they want, transaction data as narrowly targeted as they wish. Credit card line items for 35-year-old dentists living on the 400 block of Elm street in local town? By end of day.
supriyo-biswas · 6h ago
This is correct; what people fundamentally misunderstand is that data brokers directly sell personal information about people, but Google and Facebook only allow for targeted advertising while keeping personal information within the confines of their company.
andrew_lettuce · 4h ago
This isn't misunderstood, just not relevant. Google sells to a funnel that plays a numbers game, not for individuals to be targeted.
jeffbee · 6h ago
The meta-conspiracy-theory would be that the dossier industry whips up conspiracy theories about online advertisers in order to maintain their own low profile.
taeric · 6h ago
It has been truly frustrating when people will blame the "tech industry" for what is essentially reckless behavior from other industries. For a while, it was often the finance sector that did most of the crazy stuff. With crypto being an obnoxious overlap of the two.
kevin_thibedeau · 4h ago
Data brokers are the OG tech industry. They've been around since the late 60s selling consumer data. Just because it's unsexy data storage and query work doesn't make it less tech.
taeric · 3h ago
I mean, somewhat fair. But when people decry "big tech," they aren't talking about these companies.
ck_one · 5h ago
Is that actually possible? Can we do a live test here?
Let's say we want this dataset:
Credit card line items for 35-year-old dentists living on the 400 block of Elm street in local town
How much do I have to pay you to get it?
dylan604 · 5h ago
How much you got?
Never ask a sales person how much yo have to pay when the prices are not already clearly stated. Tell them how much you are willing to spend to see if they will do it for that amount. Sales people will always shoot high hoping to not leave money on the table. The price might change depending on how much you squeal and how high they shot. Your initial "willing to spend" should also be lower than you're actually willing to spend for the same but converse reason
lazyasciiart · 5h ago
Ok, so nobody here knows directly of any case where such data has been purchased, or vaguely similar, and we have no pricing information whatsoever available, but we are somehow completely knowledgeable about it being possible and how to do it? That sounds unlikely.
JohnMakin · 1h ago
Of course people do. 5 seconds spent doing the most sparse-ass research will help you find plenty of stuff. If people don't respond, I imagine, for fear of 1) outing the specific area they work in, or 2) realizing these kinds of comments aren't generally acting in good faith so it is generally a complete waste of time.
I'll waste my own time and give a trivial example just off the top of my head. Go peruse some of the products offered on this page, put on your thinking cap or even look into them further and imagine what kind of data those services provide, where it likely comes from, and where it is sold to, and you'll be well on your way - and those are just the ones that are advertised openly.
Pretty much every one of the big players people typically associate with other areas such as personal credit have some feet in this space somewhere. Then theres the hundreds of lesser-known fly-by-night guys that have their own DB's they build off of mostly what is the same data, but correlated in different ways and sold to different audiences.
There are many, many services offering data-for-sale on practically anything to practically anyone. I heard of one recently claiming it can reliably determine someone's porn preferences. The fact you personally have never come across it, or are saying you aren't, is only a data point that is interesting to you, and no one else that actually knows what they are talking about in this space. Hope this post helps you somehow.
leoqa · 4h ago
Yeah people fail to provide examples but continue to be doomers about how easy it is.
andrew_lettuce · 4h ago
The supposedly in-the-know responses here are full of bravado but not much other than "trust me, bro"
But what type of range are we talking? Tens, hundreds, thousands?
dylan604 · 4h ago
It could also mean that if you have to ask... or the first rule of data brokering...
Seems like the first thing to do would be to get an account with one of these data brokers. I'd imagine most of these places are "contact us for pricing" so they can play used car salesman games
Or, you could ask John Oliver to do it for you and then tell all of us on one of his episodes exactly how in depth it could get. They have the money to do this, and it seems like something right in his team's wheel house
chasd00 · 3h ago
i think it could be feasible to get an ad in front of "35-year-old dentists living on the 400 block of Elm street in local town" who has bought product X but i've never seen a transaction by transaction purchase history being for sale.
everdrive · 6h ago
I'm also surprised that this is so hidden from everyone. Where are the engineers leaking secrets? Much of the online discourse is pure speculation based on what can be observed from the very end of the chain. (ie, what your computer is giving up) The speculation is not necessarily _incorrect_ but is too vague to be useful to anyone. Where does my data _actually_ go? Does anyone know? Can anyone describe the life of my data as it goes through the whole ecosystem? Does anyone know what mitigations are, and are not effective?
hinterlands · 6h ago
Because what's the headline you're going to get out of it?
If the headline is "Mark Zuckerberg is amassing your data and you know it's for evil", it's an easy sell. If it's "there's an ecosystem of little-known companies that sell transaction, location and lifestyle data to marketers, journalists, PIs, and police departments alike", it's not exactly the kind of a message that spurs people to action. And yeah, the newspaper that would be breaking the news is a customer too.
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 6h ago
Despite being near universally hated externally, data brokering is a boring industry and is seen as very mundane and routine. They don't attract the type of engineers that have a strong moral stance and will go rogue and blow the whistle. They attract the middle age suburbanite just trying to get through the day and make a living.
criddell · 4h ago
> Your basic hackernews believes that e.g. Google is out there selling all your personal information.
I think most people here understand that Google sells ads against that data, but they aren't selling the data.
Melatonic · 5h ago
Anyway to opt out of this type of data collection per company? I know for some things you can contact each individual broker and opt out (via some identifier like your email address) of your data being at least publicly available
worik · 4h ago
> Credit card line items for 35-year-old dentists living on the 400 block of Elm street
I do not believe that. I would like evidence before I am convinced
If my bank is releasing that data I am horrified. I live in anew Zealand and our privacy laws are clear: it would be illegal
sofixa · 6h ago
> Your basic hackernews believes that e.g. Google is out there selling all your personal information
To add to this, any mention of "telemetry" is taken to mean your PII being taken by bad actors to abuse, instead of what it is in 99% of cases, which is usage statistics. (X% of our users use feature A, it merits investment). It can be both, but there's usually no place for differentiation, just pitchforks.
mvieira38 · 5h ago
The industry betrayed consumers' trust to the point where no project can be trusted to be mindful of data anymore. Even Proton Mail ended up ratting to the French, and that was just IP and session info, so who can we even trust to get "good telemetry"?
sofixa · 4h ago
> Even Proton Mail ended up ratting to the French,
Answering to court orders isn't "ratting". You either answer court orders or go to prison.
aspenmayer · 2h ago
Or they architect their system better so that they never collect the IP addresses to begin with. I think Privacy Pass and other things Mullvad is doing help in this area, but I am not aware of Proton working with them to implement anything like this. But Proton should do this, because it’s relevant to customers of Proton.
Apparently not Privacy Pass related, will keep looking as I seem to remember that Mullvad was doing that implementation, but I may remember incorrectly.
I don't think it is common to refer to server logs as "telemetry".
ctoth · 6h ago
> It can be both, but there's usually no place for differentiation
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 153,927,861 times, shame on me.
The place for differentiation, the place for "oh this is probably fine", the benefit of the doubt is, of course, lost.
Because someone (you? people shaped like you?) who misuse telemetry destroyed trust.
> It can be both
should instead be "it usually is both and you the user have no way to know anyway."
southernplaces7 · 5h ago
Okay, and who are these people you contact for this data, and how do they themselves obtain it so precisely? You say the big tech industry is pretty air-tight about sharing data, so how does mysterious X company have on hand the credit ratings of all those youngish dentists on Elm street, among other kinds of information? How o these dynamics work, since you seem to know it internally?
southernplaces7 · 6h ago
My question here is also how the brokers obtain the data themselves? Wouldn't it be simple for those who buy it from the brokers at a markup to just get it from its original sources themselves? Also, if the data is in any case available, the real at-fault culprits aren't so much the brokers as those who store and so easily sell it in the first instance.
roadside_picnic · 4h ago
> Wouldn't it be simple for those who buy it from the brokers at a markup to just get it from its original sources themselves?
In many cases joining datasets is both labor intensive and creates a surprising amount of new information, and there is also plenty of "free" data that is incredibly tedious to work with.
I used to work with real estate data for the government and if you search for any common things you might want to know you often land on a data brokers page even though property assessor data is freely available in most counties. The problem is each county has their own system of storing data and their own process for searching it. It's a lot of work to learn how just this one dataset works, combining this for all counties in the US is a massive project.
Whenever I buy a new home I always look up all my neighbors, figure out when they bought the house, how much they paid etc. Some people get freaked out by this, but this information is public in most counties.
By joining this data with another public data set, you can actually figure out which lender your neighbors used and what their reported income at time of sale, their age and ethnic background.
Of course there are plenty of other ways data brokers come across data, but even cleaning up and joining public data can require a fair bit of time and expertise.
tonyarkles · 4h ago
> In many cases joining datasets is both labor intensive and creates a surprising amount of new information, and there is also plenty of "free" data that is incredibly tedious to work with.
I am a perfect example of this. Due to a bit of a quirk in how my house got its address assigned to it in 1959, we have a unique postal code. If a data broker gets access to a list of product purchases by postal code from a retailer, that's in theory somewhat anonymized. However... if they also get a list of people-postal code mappings, they have now established exactly what products my wife and I have purchased (by virtue of us being the only two people with this postal code).
Do that across multiple retailers and they've painted an incredibly vivid picture of what exactly we do with our time.
southernplaces7 · 4h ago
Thanks for the detailed reply! So essentially, what many of them do is scour public data sets of all kinds, cross-reference them and repackage the more complete product as their own, which people then buy simply because it's easier to get it that way, all wrapped up neatly than doing the legwork? This is the basic gist of it? As for the complex and highly specific data about individuals, they do the same thing or do they buy from still other sources? I also wonder if they buy any hacked information off the dark web.
victorbjorklund · 5h ago
Sellers of the data wanna deal with one or a few buyers that buy bulk. They dont wanna deal with thousands of customers.
onlyrealcuzzo · 6h ago
Further, they are literally in the business of selling your data for a profit.
It should not be surprising that they are selling your data for a profit...
willguest · 7h ago
It's amazing to me that the market for data is so well hidden from public view. So many large companies are mining and trading data on a daily basis - you would think that a data marketplace would have been a thing by now, especially with all the noise about "decentralisation" (yes, I know, crypto shill bros).
I've been touting this as a business model for years. Better still, I'd like to see it done with behavioural models (in the open). That would really blow the lid off the industry. Imagine people charging companies, instead of simply being the product...
Hilift · 3h ago
Is it really that hidden? In 2021, a guy went to another person's home to exact revenge for something 50 years earlier. Security video showed him holding the PeopleFinders folder. What should surprise people is their governments are selling some of the data.
willguest · 2h ago
Thank you for making my point.
Here's some research aided by Perplexity, which estimates that the global data market is valued at about $1.7 Trillion, with data monetization growing at about 17.6% CAGR:
Also, Meta can identify you based on your movement and a few pieces of social data (all of which is in the open).
Tel Aviv airport has been running behavioural monitoring for about a decade, predicting crimes before they happen.
You mention a case from 2021, which is about $5 trillion ago, and think that the government selling data is surprising. This is mature market that already knows everything about everyone, especially in the US, and is more concerned with what to do with it. The faucet is open, the ground floor is flooded, and we're discussing the different types of fish that have moved into our apartment.
sixothree · 2h ago
Yes! It is hidden. Go and get your data from this company. Report the results.
libraryatnight · 2h ago
Just shut it down and turn it all off. Thinking of ways to profit from this behavior is perverse.
willguest · 1h ago
Thinking of ways to profit from it is the absolute norm but, yes, it is perverse.
I'd happily run it as a non-profit with the purpose of highlighting the value of people's data. Tough gig though, when there are all these "off switch" guys around.
AlexandrB · 6h ago
I don't get it. Why would CBP and ICE need to buy this from a data broker? The TSA is right there scanning everyone's boarding pass as part of going through security.
Beretta_Vexee · 6h ago
Because there is probably a well-defined regulatory framework for accessing data collected by the TSA, whereas there are few or no requirements when the same data is purchased from a broker.
It is not even certain that the data actually comes from the TSA. It could come from airlines, payment companies, etc.
There is no guarantee of quality when purchasing data from a broker.
mrweasel · 5h ago
The regulatory angle at least explains part of my wondering. I'm not really surprised that they have access to this information, I'm just surprised that they buy it, rather than just demanding it be handed over.
DistractionRect · 6h ago
Probably because the tsa isn't able/allowed to hand out access willy nilly.
It's kinda like how the police need warrants to request cellphone data, but cellphone companies could sell realtime data to third parties who in turn sold it to the police.
It's fine to speculate, but I really wish the article had made it explicit given that the EFF has actual lawyers on staff.
roadside_picnic · 4h ago
When I worked for the federal government I wanted to collect some publicly visible tweets (this was before the Library of Congress started to harvest them, and back when the API was better). As a government employee I had to write a detailed document of: why I needed this data, what PII would be stored, how long it would be stored and how I would ensure it had been deleted. Then that document had to be approved. Even though this is a project that any person could have done on the weekend, I still had to go through all this work for approval, the collect the data.
But you're proposing something even more outlandish, asking another agency for data. The politics of this are mind bending. If one one agency give their data to another and that agency is successful using it it will make the giving agency look bad which is unacceptable. It was wild how many times another, supposedly friendly agency, would not share data. In fact, I was cautioned not to even bring up the idea in shared meetings because it would create unnecessary friction.
If you buy it from a 3rd party government contractor, none of this has to happen.
krunck · 5h ago
Government uses corporations to get around laws and the constitution. Corporations in turn get to use government to get around regulation.
Same as it ever was.
fnordpiglet · 4h ago
Beyond the other reasons stated re: regulations and law, which this government seems to be more than willing to ignore, the process of setting up reliable feeds of usable data between organizational functions can be more difficult than buying the data from an entity whose profit derives from curation and distribution of the same data. It might seem absurd on the surface but paying a premium for a repackaging of the data is often meaningfully easier and more reliable and you probably save money in the end. The TSA tech teams role isn’t to package and enrich data with useful metadata, with documentation and SLAs, and their incentives don’t naturally align no matter how hard a political appointee bangs a table. The data broker has every incentive however, and will continue to in perpetuity.
renewiltord · 2h ago
At a company I once worked at, the data division of a company bought a list of their stores from us. Full polygons, visit durations, etc.
tonymet · 5h ago
Suspects purchase a flight weeks + months before the flight. The TSA screens them just minutes before getting on.
Flight purchases would be critical and distinct information for law enforcement.
andrew_lettuce · 4h ago
This is wrong. You need to provide your travel documentation id and they share your personal info well before you get on the plane
tonymet · 4h ago
Sure but when is that purchase transferred to TSA ? It’s not disclosed . I agree it’s a possibility, but having the flight purchase info is higher value and more complete .
dawnerd · 4h ago
At least 24 hours before your flight when they assign pre or the dreaded SSSS status.
Siding the topic. Does anyone have any estimate how much does a regular company make for selling this data? I do not mean those focusing on advertising. But companies that willingly sell their customers data and habits?
How do I get access to a data broker? I'm curious what info I can get about myself and others in exchange for money.
tgsovlerkhgsel · 6h ago
This could actually be interesting because in many past egregious data broker cases, the offenders had no business in the EU so they could just laugh as they were handed one 20M fine after the other (e.g. Clearview), or they were making way more than 4% of their revenue in profit from privacy violations so they could just risk the fine.
But here, the controller of the data is the airline, the transfer to the data broker might be illegal, and an airline is the worst company to commit GDPR violations with: They have a lot of global revenue but a relatively thin margin, very little of that margin comes from data abuse (so they can't just shrug off the GDPR fine as a small cost of doing shady business), and they are reachable in the EU (worst case a member state can ground and confiscate their planes, and essentially ban them from flying to the EU by threatening to confiscate any other plane that lands). And yes, Germany will impound a plane to get debts paid: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/thai-prince-to-pay-bon...
manquer · 4h ago
While airlines are the obvious source for such data sets , there are a number of other sources.
The barcode in the boarding pass contains all the information that airlines know about you [1]. It is after all only encoded and not encrypted and so many companies manufacture readers for it.
Airports check-in systems, or it could be from the baggage handling system , the duty free shop or the airport lounge and so on.
There are so many different players who have access to most or all of the data it would hard to prove it came any one source at all.
That is just the barcodes on the boarding pass, passport scanners are like couple of hundred dollars ans airport shops/car rentals use them all the time.
Many airports use facial scanning these days and don’t even ask for boarding pass/passport/visa during boarding at all .
There are auxiliary sources which could be used in conjunction with other sources like Uber booking and so on.
I agree that they can get the data through other means. Not so sure about
> There are so many different players who have access to most or all of the data it would hard to prove it came any one source at all.
Because a prosecutor can obtain copies of all emails talking about this, they can examine your bank accounts for payments from data brokers, they can require legal to give them copies of any contracts, they can look at audit logs from the production database and airlines aren't Evil Inc -- stuff will inevitably leak and get out. You can't cover yourself that well as a CEO looking to make a quick buck...
raincom · 4h ago
Who funded many data brokers in the first place? Lots of three letter agencies, through intermediaries. Modern phones + social media = zero cost surveillance for the big brother.
leptons · 4h ago
>Who funded many data brokers in the first place? Lots of three letter agencies
okay...
>zero cost surveillance for the big brother
How is it "free" if they are the ones funding the data brokers?
almosthere · 6h ago
What's the lede on this story, that data brokers are selling this data or that the purchasers are ICE/CBP?
toss1 · 5h ago
The lede is buried, and only half said:
>>"Movement unrestricted by governments is a hallmark of a free society. "
The other half of the lede is that this govt is using Insert_Method of restricting the movements of it's residents.
At this point, any persecuted activity, e.g., obtaining reproductive healthcare with a link to a person in a Red State, requires opsec procedures comparable to a CIA dark op just to not get persecuted.
theLegionWithin · 1h ago
what percentage of illegals travel on airplanes?
fallinditch · 4h ago
As far as I know there is no definitive guide for how to carry out a 'digital privacy reset' or 'digital rebirth' - but your LLM should be able to give you good instructions.
To do it properly, not only would you have to change all your logins and email accounts, but simultaneously start using a new computer and phone. Also, move home.
In other words: very hard to achieve. But I wonder if there is a set of achievable actions one can take that gets you to 'very good privacy'?
nemomarx · 3h ago
What about the records of your purchase of that new home? Do you need to again get a new bank? what about credit history
pjc50 · 2h ago
Of course, in ICE land, ditching your old identity is a disaster, because now you can't prove you're a citizen. Papers please.
maCDzP · 5h ago
Does anyone here have some tips how to ”opt out” from this?
pnw · 5h ago
It doesn't seem like you can. The airlines actually own the clearing house (ARC) that is selling the data.
dawnerd · 4h ago
You can. I emailed ARC and they complied with my request. Helps if you're in California and mention your rights. You can also opt out of them sharing your data. Any consequences to this I guess I'll find out later this year when I'm flying a lot (guessing absolutely zero).
dawnerd · 4h ago
Yes, email privacy@arccorp.com and cc legalteam@arccorp.com
You'll get a response from their legal counsel requesting some information for them to verify your request.
Melatonic · 5h ago
That's what I'm wondering - maybe a way to opt out when purchasing flights per airline?
ourmandave · 5h ago
An important part of data collection is dealing with edge cases. That's why I schedule all my travel with a layover in South Sudan.
blindriver · 5h ago
I have given up keeping my data private from the government. It’s impossible to avoid, so I signed up for Clear, etc because I know they have that information already.
Frankly, Clear and TSA-Pre makes my life so much easier and since I don’t commit crimes I’m not very worried… just a little worried.
dawnerd · 3h ago
For me its not about keeping my data private so much, more about making it harder for them to just have blanket easy access. I have a passport, precheck, global entry... they know who I am and where I go. But if I can make it just a little harder for the other gov agencies to know what I'm doing that's a win in my book.
I hate the excuse "since I don't commit crimes". It's not about that. If they want your info that you're not directly giving them, they can get a warrant.
sixothree · 2h ago
> I don’t commit crimes
What if it affects your ability to get work? Have you ever made or viewed any posts that could be considered political or made comments on a political post? What agenda do you support with those actions?
josefritzishere · 3h ago
Selling... as in my tax dollars are being wasted on this???
AtlasBarfed · 5h ago
Data brokers listen to everything, track your movements, buying habits, internet history, apps, app usage, buying habits, etc.
Terms of service are meaningless if they keep the extent as secret as possible. Facebook has demonstrably shown this and as shocking as it is they are restrained compared to lots of companies.
Especially when you can out source the full evil to a wholly owned subsidiary for plausible deniability.
And if private corpse know something, many foreign governments know all of it.
andrew_lettuce · 4h ago
And who are these shadowy data brokers listening to everything.
Heavy on the FUD, light on any details...
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 6h ago
People would be surprised at how cheap data is. My company is offered credit card purchases with demographics, occupation, income level, down to the zip code for what is basically pennies. We didn't buy it but that's what advertisers know about you.
andrew_lettuce · 4h ago
If they're selling it why wouldn't you name your company here?
ujkhsjkdhf234 · 3h ago
Why would I?
neuroelectron · 7h ago
So what else is new? Have you heard about Palantir? The government literally sells (or gives) our private data to them. This should be illegal as they don't actually own this data legally as it's not covered by EULA which is generally how data brokers get around privacy violations and governments around unreasonable search and seizure.
In 2012 I created a killer prototype that demonstrated that you could accurately reconstruct most people's flight history at scale from social media and/or ad data. Probably the first of its kind. This has been possible for a long time.
A quick sketch of how it worked:
We filtered out all spatiotemporal edges in the entity graph with an implied speed of <300 kilometers per hour or <200 kilometers distance, IIRC. This was the proxy for "was on a plane". It also implicitly provided the origin and destination.
These edges can be correlated with both public flight data and maintenance IoT data from jet engines to put entities on a specific flight. People overlook the extent to which innocuous industrial IoT data can be used as a proxy for relationships in unrelated domains.
In rare cases, there was more than one plausible commercial flight. Because we had their flight history, we assumed in these cases that it was the primary airline they had used in the past, either generally or for that specific origin and destination. This almost always resolved perfectly.
This was impressively effective and it didn't require first-party data from airlines or particularly sophisticated analytics. Space and time are the primary keys of reality.
Sounds like the bigger issue is that you're able to get "spatiotemporal" data in the first place? Otherwise it's like saying "we can figure out all stores you've been to, if we have your credit card transaction history". Sure, it's kinda creepy that you can figure out which stores I went to, but the bigger problem is that you can get the transaction data in the first place. Moreover whatever "spatiotemporal" data needed to reconstruct such flight history is probably more valuable than the flight history itself. Who cares if you know Joe flew on United 8340 when you have hour-by-hour updates on his rough location?
The preposterous thing is that payment processors aren't just allowed to collect this information and tie it to your name, they're required to do that.
People talk a big game about fighting fascism, but how can you allow these laws to exist if you can contemplate what happens when actual fascists get hold of that data going back decades? They need to be dismantled now.
I find this view to be lacking in nuance.
Laws are intended to exist with the consent of the governed. Substantially the whole of society agrees that murder should be illegal, so if someone commits murder we're willing to commit significant resources to investigating and prosecuting the perpetrator. It doesn't have to be efficient or have perfect enforcement because its purpose is to act as a deterrent. Everyone is willing to spend the resources to enforce those laws because everyone agrees that their enforcement is important. Enforcement efficiency is not required when there is popular consent.
Opposing laws that "help criminals" exposes society to shifts in the definition of a crime. When there is a law against being of a particular ethnicity or religion or political ideology, you want to enable people to be criminals. Preventing laws like that from ever being effective is worth sustaining a significant amount of inefficiency in the enforcement of other laws.
And this is not a binary distinction with "laws against murder" on one side and "laws against being Jewish" on the other. The latter is only the viscerally powerful extreme that once made us say never again.
The spectrum spans the full scale, where the middle is filled with police corruption and political retaliation against the opposition and petty busybodies inducing poverty and homelessness through the incompetent micromanagement of society.
Should governments have the ability to freeze the bank accounts of protesters? It doesn't matter what they're protesting or what crimes some minority of the protesters are alleged to have committed when the account freezes are instituted as collective punishment, the answer is no. The government should not have the ability to do that, because in that case they are the criminals, and structural defenses against government abuses are important.
Yes, wherever it is criminal to improve the wellbeing or support progress of society, I support the ability of people to be criminals.
Rosa Parks wasn't allowed to sit at the front of the bus. Criminal.
I doubt MLK had a permit for every march. Criminal.
I doubt the founding fathers were legally allowed to oppose the British taxes. Criminals.
A society with no crime is a dystopia.
If you want to do it, get a warrant.
To use the US as an example (I doubt other countries are much better) it's estimated that every adult in the US commits multiple Federal felonies per day[1], Federal law is replete with ridiculous laws[2] and the number of federal laws is uncountable by Congressional Research Service staff. Does it matter at that point?
[1] Three Felonies A Day - ISBN 978-1594035227
[2] https://x.com/CrimeADay
That's not a serious estimate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744267
Exceeding the driving speed limit is more of an "infraction" and not a crime until it becomes reckless.
Someone who smokes weed daily in a place where it's illegal could easily commit multiple crimes a day just for drug possession and consumption, for example.
There is no state where cannabis derivatives are federally legal.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-II/part-1308
To begin with, let's not ignore how broad a category "small business" is. Laws requiring health inspections or licenses etc. often operate on the basis of frequency or number of patrons. If you have around a dozen people over for movie night every Saturday with the event published on social media and you all chip in for pizza, are you a food service business? For that matter, is that a public performance in violation of copyright?
If some criminals break into one of your devices or your personal website while you're traveling and you find out about it while you're out of state but don't have time to deal with it until you get back home, have you committed a crime? What if they put some illegal materials there and you clean off the device but still have a backup containing the illegal materials? What if you do delete all of them right away; is that destruction of evidence? What if there's a federal law against keeping the materials and a state law against destruction of evidence and a very specific way to comply with both of them at the same time that may not have been clearly decided by the appellate court when it was happening but has been decided by the time they bring the case against you? What if it was clear ahead of time but wasn't intuitive and you can't afford a lawyer and can't have one appointed until after you've been charged?
It's unreasonable to expect ordinary people to be able to navigate this.
That's what courts are for. I don't think there's any case where people tried to prosecute a shared movie night as a business, because it'd be laughed out of court. Same goes for whether it's copyright infringement or not. Moreover if you look at how authoritarian regimes work in practice, dissents are often prosecuted under national security laws, campaign finance violations, or libel laws, not because they violated the health code by having a movie night.
Almost all data is spatiotemporal data, people just aren't used to thinking about it like that. Everything that "happens" is an event with associated times and places.
Tagging of events with spatiotemporal attributes, or with metadata that can be used to infer spatiotemporal attributes, is pervasive. Every system data passes through, even if not the creator of it, observes the event of the data passing through it. Event observation is not trying to track things but it implicitly and necessarily creates the data that makes tracking and spatiotemporal inference possible.
These kinds of analyses rely almost entirely on knowing the events occurred; you could encrypt the contents of the data and it wouldn't matter. Software leaks spatiotemporal event context everywhere across myriad systems, internal and external, that incidentally collect it. There isn't anything nefarious about most of it and much of it is required for reasons of criminal and civil liability.
What people underestimate is that you can analytically stitch together many unrelated sparse data sources with spatiotemporal attributes, many of which are quite crap or seemingly unfit for purpose, to reconstruct a dense high-quality graph. Counter-intuitively, diverse and seemingly irrelevant data sources often produce better data models. It surfaces bias, errors, manipulation, and processing artifacts in individual sources you might otherwise miss.
It is much more difficult to access the obvious first-party data sources than it used to be, mostly because people with that data are far more selective about who they give access. It doesn't really matter, that is a speed bump for the unsophisticated. The exponential growth in the scale and diversity of network-connected telemetry of all types pretty much guarantees these data models will always be constructible.
The historical limiter has always been the absence of data infrastructure platforms that can handle these kinds of analytics at scale.
Yeah, this just sounds like it's written from the perspective of a data broker.
Tying particular ad analytics (presumably ip geolocation?) to thousands of particular individuals and having it well populated enough to track them is "privileged first-party data access" by another name.
Okay, fine, I'll just install another operating system then, like KDE plasma mobile or GrapheneOS. Your location is still leaked 24/7. This is because your cellular modem has it's own operating system, running underneath your phone's operating system, which is triangulating your location at all times. Once again, you are trusting that telecommunications companies aren't misusing this - but please remember they're complied, by law, to make a lot of this information available to numerous third parties.
Okay fine, let me just remove the Sim then and use my phone on Wifi only, always through a VPN. Your location is still being leaked potentially, for example, by your car. Your car also has a cellular modem which leaks your location, and you probably signed a contract allowing that data to be given to hundreds of third-parties.
Of course, all of this is assuming you don't use any social media. Social media can also leak your location, even without location services. If you review a restaurant - that's your location. Where are your friends? You're probably around them. And on and on.
source?
>You are trusting that this data is not leaked to any third-parties. You cannot verify this, as the data is exfiltrated to servers which you can't verify.
At least on Android you can theoretically disable "google location accuracy" which stops it sending nearby hotspot mac addresses to Google. That's the only public route where google gets your location without you knowingly sending to it. You also imply that mobile operating systems are surreptitiously sending locations back to google/apple even if users have all location related features disabled, but I'm not aware of any evidence this is the case, and this falls into same category as "facebook is secretly listening to you" territory until proven otherwise.
It's also disappointing that the root comment is distracting from the 4th amendment violations by making the conversation about their vague claims of selling mini-palantir demos through abusing web ads.
Any data exhaust will work, people have created interesting PoCs leveraging things like HVAC data, RF attenuation, etc. High-precision weather models essentially work the same way, making inferences by stitching together diverse event data that has nothing to do with weather.
High-quality high-resolution data sources largely don't exist in the way people imagine they do, so you need to do this anyway. If you have a high-resolution spatiotemporal graph for entities, tying it to identity is always trivial.
It would be more common if it weren't for the fact that open source platforms scale poorly for this type of analytical processing.
I also have a lot of experience with privileged first-party data but that is governed by a different set of rules and is often regulated. You have to be much more circumspect about how you use it.
Even though it might be convenient to e.g. slurp telemetry off a mobile carrier's backbone, what you eventually realize is the inability to do this isn't a real limitation and in some ways is a blessing in disguise.
I'm sure that other platforms attach the same kind of info to posts. It's just a matter of scraping it.
People on this site probably understand this better than 99% of the world.
The problem is "What can I, as an individual, do about it?"
Some airlines don't even allow you to check in without using their app, unless you are willing to pay for a fee.
> you have a record of a lot of location/timestamp data for people
What is the source of that data?
So if you have ad impression data you have IP geolocation, or maybe better, along with the timestamp. Similarly for socials sometimes you get location metadata, and with image uploads you can can get location metadata (though today these are often stripped, historically they weren't).
However, it turns out that thousands of people like to talk about their flights on social media, so we scraped that as a spot check and it mostly lined up perfectly. Good enough for a demo and it would have been difficult to come up with an alternative explanation for the patterns in the data.
The purpose of the PoC was to sell the data analysis infrastructure that made that type analysis possible at scale, it wasn't about the data per se. It was a compelling demo we invented given the data that happened to be available. Startup life.
For fun edge cases, there's always Antarctica, where you can travel from a US base (which looks like you're in the US) to a NZ base (which looks like you're in NZ) in a couple of minutes: https://brr.fyi/posts/credit-card-shenanigans
- https://www.blakefire-security.co.uk/blog/social-media-and-j...
>- https://www.blakefire-security.co.uk/blog/social-media-and-j...
FYI the source you posted never claimed that John Terry's insurance tried to deny the claim, only mentioning that "some" insurance companies warn of it. However even that claim is questionable, because it isn't even from an insurance company, it's from a content marketing piece by an insurance comparison website.
ARC and IATA absolutely do play such a role, as the financial clearinghouses for ensuring that travel agents (online and offline) and airlines can pay each other, and as gatekeepers/certification bodies for agencies to ensure these financial systems aren't abused.
Now, they absolutely do sell access to data to third parties, governmental and nongovernmental. But the reason they have this data isn't because they buy it to resell it; they are fully part of the funds flow for the underlying transaction. Whether they should be allowed to sell or share non-anonymized data on passenger records and prices paid is a very good question, but at the very least this is about as first-party as data gets.
https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/airline-reporting-corporation... describes some of these flows. (Here be dragons.)
The general public have no idea how much ad providers and data brokers know about them.
Relevant article: http://archive.today/fzUL4
I’m guessing with the help of Palantir, the government has even more data and can probably link Reddit posts etc based on styleometry and can even perform psychological analysis on your personality and tendencies, etc.
After being burnt by things taken from my social media out of context, used to publicly shame me, I locked down my social media
Am I "sweetly naive" to think that had an effect? I do think it did
Before I stopped using Facebook I noticed, over the last decade, that almost every account I encountered was locked down similarly
My point is I suspect it is getting harder, not easier, for data thieves. The golden age of data theft has passed. Maybe.
It’s amazing how much worse things have gotten, yet how people seem to care less now than they used to.
I wonder if it’s just consumers being so overwhelmed by their lack of control that they’ve become apathetic to the problem as a whole.
Do banks sell this information? This bill was pulled from this ATM in Georgia by one Claudius McMoneyhands, and then deposited by one CashMoneyBusiness LLC in South Carolina three weeks later
Seems like there could still be intermediaries and a lack of what you actually bought with it at least?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/magazine/hank-asher-data....
I'm aware that using adblockers and avoiding social media doesn't entirely prevent tracking, shadow profiles, and such, but surely it makes things more difficult for these companies, no? Or would you say that there's practically no difference between making an effort to preserve one's privacy and just giving up entirely?
In Manufacturing Consent they measured column inches in the NYT-- IIRC it was something like measuring the total that support the relevant U.S. administration's official position on given policy vs. inches that went against the gov't position. In any case, they were measuring column inches.
What were you measuring to come to your conclusion?
If the FTC could do anything here to make this situation better, it would be to give every person access to any data about them that gets sold.
If you were caught demoing something both horrific and internal you would risk serious damage to your career, and ultimately will have zero impact on the industry as there's just too much data out there and too much money wrapped up in it.
Plus, most people working with the data don't bother to look at it. The places I've internally demo'd massive privacy risks were shocked because they didn't realize what their own data was capable of. Most people are just writing jobs that run and shuffle data around from one place to another never really asking "what is this data?" Even among data scientists I'm routinely surprised (so maybe I shouldn't be surprised) how frequently data scientist never do any real error analysis by looking at what the model got wrong and trying to understand why.
https://therecord.media/ftc-complaint-against-kochava-unseal...
Among the additional information Kochava collects and sells are non-anonymized individual home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, gender, age, ethnicity, yearly income, “economic stability,” marital status, education level, political affiliation and “interests and behaviors,” compiling and selling dossiers on individuals marketed as offering a “360-degree perspective,” the FTC said.
...
According to the FTC, Kochava’s data can identify women who visit reproductive clinics by name and address along with, for example, when they visit particular buildings, their names, email and home addresses, number of children, race and app usage.
...
Kochava marketing materials tell customers it offers “rich geo data spanning billions of devices globally” and that its location data feed “delivers raw latitude/longitude data with volumes around 94B+ geo-transactions per month, 125 million monthly active users, and 35 million daily active users, on average observing more than 90 daily transactions per device.”
...
The complaint also alleges that the company has lax procedures for determining who it is selling data to, saying purchasers are allowed to use a generic personal email address, label an alleged company as “self” and explain they plan to use the data for “business.”
And then there's this: https://therecord.media/data-brokers-are-selling-military-se...
I know someone who bought the address of everyone with a specific first name.
Where I live it is.
Let's say we want this dataset: Credit card line items for 35-year-old dentists living on the 400 block of Elm street in local town
How much do I have to pay you to get it?
Never ask a sales person how much yo have to pay when the prices are not already clearly stated. Tell them how much you are willing to spend to see if they will do it for that amount. Sales people will always shoot high hoping to not leave money on the table. The price might change depending on how much you squeal and how high they shot. Your initial "willing to spend" should also be lower than you're actually willing to spend for the same but converse reason
I'll waste my own time and give a trivial example just off the top of my head. Go peruse some of the products offered on this page, put on your thinking cap or even look into them further and imagine what kind of data those services provide, where it likely comes from, and where it is sold to, and you'll be well on your way - and those are just the ones that are advertised openly.
https://www.transunion.com/business
Pretty much every one of the big players people typically associate with other areas such as personal credit have some feet in this space somewhere. Then theres the hundreds of lesser-known fly-by-night guys that have their own DB's they build off of mostly what is the same data, but correlated in different ways and sold to different audiences.
There are many, many services offering data-for-sale on practically anything to practically anyone. I heard of one recently claiming it can reliably determine someone's porn preferences. The fact you personally have never come across it, or are saying you aren't, is only a data point that is interesting to you, and no one else that actually knows what they are talking about in this space. Hope this post helps you somehow.
Yea, you know everything, don't you.
Seems like the first thing to do would be to get an account with one of these data brokers. I'd imagine most of these places are "contact us for pricing" so they can play used car salesman games
Or, you could ask John Oliver to do it for you and then tell all of us on one of his episodes exactly how in depth it could get. They have the money to do this, and it seems like something right in his team's wheel house
If the headline is "Mark Zuckerberg is amassing your data and you know it's for evil", it's an easy sell. If it's "there's an ecosystem of little-known companies that sell transaction, location and lifestyle data to marketers, journalists, PIs, and police departments alike", it's not exactly the kind of a message that spurs people to action. And yeah, the newspaper that would be breaking the news is a customer too.
I think most people here understand that Google sells ads against that data, but they aren't selling the data.
I do not believe that. I would like evidence before I am convinced
If my bank is releasing that data I am horrified. I live in anew Zealand and our privacy laws are clear: it would be illegal
To add to this, any mention of "telemetry" is taken to mean your PII being taken by bad actors to abuse, instead of what it is in 99% of cases, which is usage statistics. (X% of our users use feature A, it merits investment). It can be both, but there's usually no place for differentiation, just pitchforks.
Answering to court orders isn't "ratting". You either answer court orders or go to prison.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/privacy-pass-the-new-pro...
Apparently not Privacy Pass related, will keep looking as I seem to remember that Mullvad was doing that implementation, but I may remember incorrectly.
https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/mullvad-has-partnered-wi...
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 153,927,861 times, shame on me.
The place for differentiation, the place for "oh this is probably fine", the benefit of the doubt is, of course, lost.
Because someone (you? people shaped like you?) who misuse telemetry destroyed trust.
> It can be both
should instead be "it usually is both and you the user have no way to know anyway."
In many cases joining datasets is both labor intensive and creates a surprising amount of new information, and there is also plenty of "free" data that is incredibly tedious to work with.
I used to work with real estate data for the government and if you search for any common things you might want to know you often land on a data brokers page even though property assessor data is freely available in most counties. The problem is each county has their own system of storing data and their own process for searching it. It's a lot of work to learn how just this one dataset works, combining this for all counties in the US is a massive project.
Whenever I buy a new home I always look up all my neighbors, figure out when they bought the house, how much they paid etc. Some people get freaked out by this, but this information is public in most counties.
By joining this data with another public data set, you can actually figure out which lender your neighbors used and what their reported income at time of sale, their age and ethnic background.
Of course there are plenty of other ways data brokers come across data, but even cleaning up and joining public data can require a fair bit of time and expertise.
I am a perfect example of this. Due to a bit of a quirk in how my house got its address assigned to it in 1959, we have a unique postal code. If a data broker gets access to a list of product purchases by postal code from a retailer, that's in theory somewhat anonymized. However... if they also get a list of people-postal code mappings, they have now established exactly what products my wife and I have purchased (by virtue of us being the only two people with this postal code).
Do that across multiple retailers and they've painted an incredibly vivid picture of what exactly we do with our time.
It should not be surprising that they are selling your data for a profit...
I've been touting this as a business model for years. Better still, I'd like to see it done with behavioural models (in the open). That would really blow the lid off the industry. Imagine people charging companies, instead of simply being the product...
Here's some research aided by Perplexity, which estimates that the global data market is valued at about $1.7 Trillion, with data monetization growing at about 17.6% CAGR:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/today-i-would-like-to-try-a... (138 sources)
Also, Meta can identify you based on your movement and a few pieces of social data (all of which is in the open).
Tel Aviv airport has been running behavioural monitoring for about a decade, predicting crimes before they happen.
You mention a case from 2021, which is about $5 trillion ago, and think that the government selling data is surprising. This is mature market that already knows everything about everyone, especially in the US, and is more concerned with what to do with it. The faucet is open, the ground floor is flooded, and we're discussing the different types of fish that have moved into our apartment.
I'd happily run it as a non-profit with the purpose of highlighting the value of people's data. Tough gig though, when there are all these "off switch" guys around.
It is not even certain that the data actually comes from the TSA. It could come from airlines, payment companies, etc.
There is no guarantee of quality when purchasing data from a broker.
It's kinda like how the police need warrants to request cellphone data, but cellphone companies could sell realtime data to third parties who in turn sold it to the police.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17081684
But you're proposing something even more outlandish, asking another agency for data. The politics of this are mind bending. If one one agency give their data to another and that agency is successful using it it will make the giving agency look bad which is unacceptable. It was wild how many times another, supposedly friendly agency, would not share data. In fact, I was cautioned not to even bring up the idea in shared meetings because it would create unnecessary friction.
If you buy it from a 3rd party government contractor, none of this has to happen.
Flight purchases would be critical and distinct information for law enforcement.
But here, the controller of the data is the airline, the transfer to the data broker might be illegal, and an airline is the worst company to commit GDPR violations with: They have a lot of global revenue but a relatively thin margin, very little of that margin comes from data abuse (so they can't just shrug off the GDPR fine as a small cost of doing shady business), and they are reachable in the EU (worst case a member state can ground and confiscate their planes, and essentially ban them from flying to the EU by threatening to confiscate any other plane that lands). And yes, Germany will impound a plane to get debts paid: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/thai-prince-to-pay-bon...
The barcode in the boarding pass contains all the information that airlines know about you [1]. It is after all only encoded and not encrypted and so many companies manufacture readers for it.
Airports check-in systems, or it could be from the baggage handling system , the duty free shop or the airport lounge and so on.
There are so many different players who have access to most or all of the data it would hard to prove it came any one source at all.
That is just the barcodes on the boarding pass, passport scanners are like couple of hundred dollars ans airport shops/car rentals use them all the time.
Many airports use facial scanning these days and don’t even ask for boarding pass/passport/visa during boarding at all .
There are auxiliary sources which could be used in conjunction with other sources like Uber booking and so on.
[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass...
> There are so many different players who have access to most or all of the data it would hard to prove it came any one source at all.
Because a prosecutor can obtain copies of all emails talking about this, they can examine your bank accounts for payments from data brokers, they can require legal to give them copies of any contracts, they can look at audit logs from the production database and airlines aren't Evil Inc -- stuff will inevitably leak and get out. You can't cover yourself that well as a CEO looking to make a quick buck...
okay...
>zero cost surveillance for the big brother
How is it "free" if they are the ones funding the data brokers?
>>"Movement unrestricted by governments is a hallmark of a free society. "
The other half of the lede is that this govt is using Insert_Method of restricting the movements of it's residents.
At this point, any persecuted activity, e.g., obtaining reproductive healthcare with a link to a person in a Red State, requires opsec procedures comparable to a CIA dark op just to not get persecuted.
To do it properly, not only would you have to change all your logins and email accounts, but simultaneously start using a new computer and phone. Also, move home.
In other words: very hard to achieve. But I wonder if there is a set of achievable actions one can take that gets you to 'very good privacy'?
You'll get a response from their legal counsel requesting some information for them to verify your request.
Frankly, Clear and TSA-Pre makes my life so much easier and since I don’t commit crimes I’m not very worried… just a little worried.
I hate the excuse "since I don't commit crimes". It's not about that. If they want your info that you're not directly giving them, they can get a warrant.
What if it affects your ability to get work? Have you ever made or viewed any posts that could be considered political or made comments on a political post? What agenda do you support with those actions?
Terms of service are meaningless if they keep the extent as secret as possible. Facebook has demonstrably shown this and as shocking as it is they are restrained compared to lots of companies.
Especially when you can out source the full evil to a wholly owned subsidiary for plausible deniability.
And if private corpse know something, many foreign governments know all of it.
But hey, it makes Silicon Valley money.