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This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult
This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult
Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America's 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records-known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person's car-and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10.
bloomberg.com




Stttooooooopppppppppp. Why are all the things that sound and feel like conspiracies all true!?
In this case, maybe it's because we are the product?
This is terrifying because there seems like literally nothing we can do about this. I feel like I can do something about a lot of the things in the world that bothers me (and hey, maybe it's a placebo and I'm just a drop in the ocean and nothing I do matters, but whatever, thinking otherwise makes me feel better), but when it comes to this kind of big data? I am definitely a drop in that ocean whether I like it or not.
In a way, maybe the fact that so many are being monitored on so many ways, makes us anonymous? Not that this is right, rather, the scale of it may make us as individuals invisible?
Maybe. You'd be so easy to identify if someone wanted to, though. It's so frustrating that our only options seem to be either "Have no privacy and be upset about it" or "Have no privacy and be okay with it."