I can has privacy?

“How much control should an individual have over their personal information?,” Phillips muses as he shows me around. “I think individuals should have more control than they do, significantly more control. Individuals ultimately should be required to provide their explicit consent for the use of that information."

You would think these would be the words of a privacy advocate. You would be wrong. The man behind Aristotle Inc, John Aristotle Phillips, values his own privacy, but buys and sells every little piece of data about you that he can get.

His metier is marrying voter registration lists to everything else and selling that information to politicians for microtargeting voters.

“What we do is help a campaign run more and more like an effective business,” Phillips says as he types on his laptop, bringing up on a large projection screen the profile of an actual voter in Atlanta, whom we’ll call John Smith.

Phillips hits a button and up pops Smith’s basic information—address, phone number, etc. A click of the mouse brings more personal information—his photograph, his age and occupation, the names of his adult family members, his party affiliation and approximate income. Another click summons the exact amounts of political donations he has made. Phillips clicks once more, and a kind of molecular model appears on-screen, showing every political donor and potentially influential person Smith is linked to, in Atlanta and beyond, with dozens of interlocking nodes. Each node leads to the profile of another voter, about whom Aristotle knows just as much or more.

And when he's not selling your data to politicians, he's selling it to anybody who's got a credit card.

Webbery

I was reading about the high price of free credit reports the other day, and decided to look up the text of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, since I think as highly of credit bureaus as I do of for-profit health insurance.

So, while I was composing a post in my head on the FCRA, I was also surfing some of my favorite blogs, which lead me to the EFF's FOIA Litigation: Abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs).

They've gone to some trouble to get this information, and will be putting a lot more effort into the project it looks like:

EFF received these documents as the result of a FOIA request made through our FLAG project. We ask that you please mention EFF if you use these documents in any way. We're a nonprofit organization, and our funding for this project depends on showing that our work is important and relevant. For more information about these documents or EFF's FLAG project, please contact EFF Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann at marcia(at)eff.org.

I'm a fan of EFF, and not a fan of being spied on, so I thought I'd take a crack at some small portion of the project. I'm on page 45 [of 199] of the very first background documaent, A Review of the Frderal Bureau of Investigation's Use of National Security Letters, so I may not get around to actually contributing much.

A couple of years ago, I was reading in one of the magazines that only a geek could love about the FBI's antiquated computer system and their buggy database, and I remember thinking even I could do better than that. 45 pages into it and I'm glad they can't get their act together. I think.

via

Sermonizing and stuff

• I've added a link in the sidebar to BibleGateway.com. Not to worry, though, I haven't got religion. I just want to be able to recklessly throw around Bible quotes. I used to be able to do this from memory, but have since decided to devote those brain cells to other functions.



• Verse of the Day for today, when I did happen upon BibleGateway.com, was “But the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen and protect you from the evil one.”- 2 Thessalonians 3:3 I'm not sure if Jesus can save me from Darth Cheney, but Thessalonians is just a fun word to say.



• Speaking of whom, in Ron Suskind's book The One Percent Doctrine, Cheney justifies the GWOT and all of his other actions basically, by saying that if there's even a 1% chance of ___insert fear-of-the-day here___ happening, we must act as if it is true. Not that he ever bothers to show his work on those calculations. What goes into deciding that there's a 1% chance that Saddam Hussein had WMDs? I'm betting Cheney just pulled a number out of the ether.



• Speaking of pulling numbers out of ethers, in that same book, Cheney or some henchperson figures out that if you follow the money, you can maybe track terrorists. Rather than hurriedly cobble together a computer program and/or database, they just went to FirstData and got all their data. Yep, that's right, FirstData would be the company that handles abut half the credit card transactions in the US. Cheney didn't even have to snarl at them to get them to hand over the info, they were plumb tickled to do their patriotic duty and help their country. Nor is this the first-ever time in history that the government has asked a huge corporation to hand over their records of their customers' transactions and the corporation has complied.



• Speaking of credit: a small public service announcement



• Google Street View is still just a fun toy, no way are we anywhere near living in a panopticon society, right? Well, maybe just in New York City and London and a few other places and a few remote spots in sunny Florida.

Dear Google:

found it at the best lolcats site evah of course

If you won't listen to me, maybe you'll listen to the cats. Your slogan, Don't Be Evil, is a good one, but it doesn't go far enough. How about you expand it to include, Don't Facilitate Evil. I'm a believer in Dirk Gently's interconnectedness of all things, and I like having lots of information at my fingertips like this, but y'all are going overboard. If I wanted everybody and his cousin's jackass to know all about me, I'd move back to that small town I left.

Dear Google:

Are you listening? Probably you are. Do you care what I want? Maybe you do. Will you do as I ask? Probably not, but here goes.

Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine
By SAUL HANSELL
Published: June 3, 2007
[NYT article, may require registration to view]

That tweak about the "hot news" for new items is a good one. Keep that one.

Personalized search? Already I don't like it. The whole reason I use Google is to find stuff outside of my own personal realm. If you're restricting what I see based on what you think I want to see, I'll have to go look elsewhere.

Privacy issues. Lots of them, and they're piling up. I'm sure you already know all about this, being the secretive bastards you are when it comes to your stuff. Quit collecting my secrets.

Stuff you might ought to know about.

Or not.

I've been running a bit of a spoon deficit lately, so I'm not up for actually writing [or even thinking] right now, but I thought I'd point out some items I found at the Public Citizen Consumer Law and Policy Blog. What they said.


Food

• Preventing Contamination Of Our Food Supply: Is FDA Up To The Task?

Privacy

• The Spy Act Protects Corporations, Not Consumers


• More Google Privacy Fears


• Uncle Sam: Dangerously Careless With Our SSNs

Corporations behaving badly and Lobbyists run amok

• Is There A Relationship Between Predatory Mortgage Lending And Political Contributions?

Skip the above if you like, but read the links in this post

• Poverty in Business Week