The part that bothers me is the government has been doing pretty much nothing to protect us, and actually one side of our political system advocates for unrestricted access and unlimited usage of big data because enterprising entities can use the data over and over again to make money. Unfortunately they don't seem to consider how sophisticated data collection and compilation has become, and how much of a threat big data poses to individuals or society at large.
It should bother you. The ability to track data is the ability to conduct surveillance.
Our government is (theoretically) bound by constitutional restrictions as to what actions it may legally conduct. It is also (again theoretically) subject to oversight.
Corporations in the US have no such safeguards or restrictions imposed on them. By default, anything not specifically forbidden under law is legal.
So if you want to have a pervasive and largely invisible surveillance system that functions without any Constitutional safeguards, judicial review, or independent oversight, the easiest, quickest, and cheapest way to obtain it is to simply not pass legislation that effectively restricts what data private companies are allowed to gather and share. And this “nod and a wink” arrangement between government and Big Data lhas been going on for many years now. Because under this arrangement information that was once only legally obtainable under a warrant issued after proof of “probable cause” can now be gotten through a friendly request and a company’s act of “voluntary cooperation with investigators.”
It’s good to have cooperative friends and quid pro quo isn’t it?
The real reason there are no effective laws protecting your privacy is because your government doesn’t want your privacy protected in any real sense of the word. This isn’t politics or political rhetoric on my part either. It’s a statement about history, engineering, and responsibility. The community of information technology professionals which I was a part of for over 35 years until I recently retired has been voicing its concerns and warning about this since the mid 90s. IT people work at the ground floor level of your data flow. We understand the technology driving it and how it’s used as well as just how easily and effectively it can be abused. We've been watching this global stealth surveillance system grow for decades. The difference now is that some people are very much aware of this capability - and are more than willing to use it.
And the interesting thing about this is how it wasn’t planned per se. It was always there. Something that came along for the ride. Computer systems track every bit of data that flows through them. That’s what they do. They need to in order to operate at all. At their core they’re very simple machines that aren't much more than a glorified clock.
Who uses them, and what they get used for, isn’t quite so simple a matter.
Just a simple clock…
