Barnes TechRecently it has been widely reported about how the NSA is buying up American’s data - New York Times, and Tech Crunch.
Senators are obviously acting like this is some huge scandal, because it’s part of the government doing this, but I don’t understand how they are confused by this. (I do actually know, it’s because Congress doesn’t understand technology, but my point is the same). Of course the NSA is buying this data. It’s valuable, and critically it’s commercially available. This means pretty much anyone could buy it if they really wanted to. You think Google and Facebook don’t just vacuum up the same data?
To me the problem is not the NSA buying this data, it’s that it’s possible to buy this data. It’s that companies are somehow allowed to gather and keep this data in the first place, so that anyone can buy it. The internet is so addicted to surveillance on all of us, just to squeeze a tiny bit more money out from advertising, but it’s a huge problem.
We desperately need laws in this country to protect our privacy, or this can and will continue to happen. We should all have the right to know what data is being gathered and what it is being used for, and importantly have a choice to NOT have it collected.