Every corporation is trying to spy on you. Why wouldn't they? There is no real punishment, and large reward. As long as that is true, superficial regulations around tracking will always be circumvented or hollowed out. We need fundamental change in the way corporations interact with society, and in what is expected of them.
Everyone saying everything other than "Consumers are going to need to be willing to spend more money for things, and people with less money are going to be hit the hardest as they benefit the most from the data economy."
Data has value is flatly true statement. So at best we can have system where you can keep your data and pay more, or sell your data and pay less. The rub here though is that the people who have the means to keep their data, also have the most valuable data, and in our current system subsidize the cost of people with less valuable data, who happen to be the people who would want the most to sell their data.
All of that is to say, the solution is not cut and dry.
>So at best we can have system where you can keep your data and pay more, or sell your data and pay less.
And that would be fine, but without more rigorous controls on corporate behavior, you'll end up paying more and not keeping your data.
Those that can race tot he bottom and get away with it are usually the ones the have a better chance of survival. I don't like it one bit but that is a good summary of business nowadays.
My bank somehow isn't selling my transaction data to the highest bidder though.
Your bank is very likely doing just that. They even send you a notice about it every year.
You sure about that? Visa/Mastercars certainly are selling at least aggregated data if not more.
Yes they do, and hedge funds buy it so they have consumer spending data before the rest of the market does.
This is the long tail of monopoly and cartel power. We need a fundamental change in the _size_ of corporations. They're otherwise too big to regulate and changing expectations will achieve nothing.
The problem is that in an unregulated capital system, money naturally flows uphill. The industrial revolution made this clear to everyone early on, and so we got anti-trust laws and progressive taxation. But over the decades, anti-trust laws have been weakened or left unenforced, and progressive taxation largely died in the 1980s. We need to reinvigorate these measures, and also look for more structural ways to counter-balance the advantage of capital over merit in our economy.
The time to do this was 30 years ago. While today we need it more than ever, it is probably already too late: corporations will find those trying to do this and stop them.
One can easily imagine pragmatic Tories saying the same thing about the American Revolution: "We should have done this 30 years ago, there's not point in trying now."
Indeed. It started with intercepting letters and couriers, then storing phone calls, radio communications, operating labs to build DNA databases from blood samples, and now large-scale data collection for AI.
Archives tie Epstein and Maxwell individually to various companies in those areas, and a truckload of familiar family names show up along them. My assessment is that people like Thiel and Musk are not self-made, they are intelligence nepo children leveraging aristocratic/colonial offshore wealth of their families.
What is better than being rich and above the law due to your role in intelligence?
Don't forget Bill Gates. People generally don't know he's heir of one of the richest banking families in Washington state.
One thing is old money, another is telling everyone you are selfmade when in fact you are a nepo kid.
If you are old money you tend towards intelligence roles because they give you diplomatic passport and make you immune to the law. It is much better than owning 5 passports from some banana republic because in the end only military might of the colonial powers counts (e.g. the british crown).
So many of the silicon valley idols we cherish are in fact old money, parents were in intelligence, the child made a tech company, tech was national security relevant, they got funding and daddy handled their competitors through their government institution. Have a look at founders of YC for example. Or Mr. Thiel who officially came from nothing but miraculously has a university named after him and is super-deep into intelligence. Or Musk where unfortunately a lot of archives from South Africa are unavailable for research, but his wealth definitely does not come from repatriating colonial wealth from South Africa to the US.
In terms of realpolitik all is fine but if you start fabricating terrorist attacks to cover up a potential PR scandal for your shitty family you are way out of line. And at that point only the next large-scale attack helps you cover up the scandal. Several tangential names in the Epstein files fall victims to freak terrorist attacks - those are quite convenient because they get rid of idealist defectors and have a new thing to set the public agenda with.
It is how the world works and we have to accept it.
Many of these people follow a pattern, where they (apparently) come from nothing and very early in their careers become advisors or get capital from a very rich and powerful person/company. This should give you pause and realize that it doesn't happen to a normal person. The true answer is either their parents or close associates, people they trust. Bill Gates is an example where his true golden ticket was a contract with IBM that was only possible because IBM's CEO was a trusted friend of his mom.
What does it mean to be ‘in intelligence’ in this context?
Performing privileged work for the government in some shape or form which allows you to skirt the legal rules and makes you immune to certain issues (e.g. travel with diplomatic passport or invent fake identities to hide your real family tree). In force-colonized countries such as South Africa, the local colonial overlords openly looted the country, first in the name of the monarch and later for their own wealthy class which was still deeply connected to the European aristocracy. The colonialist class in South Africa most likely were also involved with the South African intelligence community and secret police, with all the special status this entails.
But simply focusing on five-eyes three-letter agencies is too narrow because there are thousands of "inofficial" entities surrounding them. And at least on paper if you are working in intelligence you're an idealistic government servant. History shows that most whistleblowers we read about are these kind of idealists, because they notice that not all five-eyes governments are equal. Some are monarchies, and the crown did many things which are incompatible with democratic values of US citizens and the narrative of the "American dream" they learned from Hollywood.
People always blame CIA and their black budgets, but what if CIA was actually subverted by the British crown and their colonial aristocracy?
The most famous spy in the world is James Bond, 007, not a "yankee". The British broke the Enigma and had extensive experience managing hundreds of colonies and their local populations, supposedly even introducing foreign pathogens as biological warfare on native populations.
Maxwell family was big in software and networking, especially for identity control. Epstein family was blacklisted from Hollywood due to antisemitism and moved into radio stations & broadway. Jeffrey was arrested by Scotland Yard in London and a bit earlier Jarecki was arrested in East Germany and later stationed for a very long time in Heidelberg, which is 1hr away from Thiel's official origin story, and also close to where the Trump family originated from in a different era.
Fred Trump sent youth abroad from NY area with the American Foreign Service (AFS), which during the cold war was at least relevant for national security, because each of the students could be converted into communists by foreign agencies.
When the King visited the white house, Mr. Trump was seemingly out of character and did not speak a bad word.
The connections between Trump and intelligence have really been hidden by the media, but they're quite obvious. He was running a "model agency" just like Epstein, so he was in the same business. His luxury real estate business for rich foreigners from East Europe follows the same pattern, and there he employed Felix Sater who came out publicly as a CIA operative during the "Russiagate" investigations. His businesses were in part a facade for intelligence operations. Nobody should forget Trump was a protege of Roy Cohn, of all people... This explains why he makes so many moves with almost certainty of impunity.
There's documents that show Trump's father searching for a boat captain who can ship goods from Florida to New York.
I have a feeling that black folks living in the Trump-owned low-income areas were the final destination for the weapons-for-drugs trades which also included names such as Epstein and Kashoggi. Germany gets linked into this through Terramar which was used to get machinery and chemical precursor materials to a country of their choice. Famously these deals were paid in cash at the New Jersey offices of German companies - if at all.
I think the casinos were used for drug money laundering, until he got a knock on the door and stopped doing that.
Even before Trump the Epsteins were in the pageants/model industry involved with the "Miss Universe" aimed at foreign aristocrats. Coincidentally another now-famous family name in those credits is "Sweeney".