It's concerning that this is now an LGB and women's issue now, but I really encourage people to begin purchasing USB drives or external hard drives and saving digital research on things such as gay & lesbian history, screenshots of tweets that might be important, homosexual and bisexual research, women's history, radical feminist books or PDFs, and really just anything that is at risk of being "corrected" by gender ideology or made inaccessible by academic publishers.
We need to save these things in a hard copy format as opposed to just using internet archive or taking Sci-hub for granted, because these organizations are experiencing heavy lawsuits. Additionally, it's becoming common for LGB and gender nonconformity history and research to be "rewritten" by gender ideologists. Actually, this is even true for past research and history on transvestism and transsexualism, too, in addition to things such as sex dysphoria, etc.
I bought three 64GB USBs for just $25. If you can't afford an external hardrive, buy some different colored USBs and start building your own library. We need to preserve this information and decentralize it as much as possible. It's worrisome enough that we rely on digital archives this much just generally, especially with the advent of AI and government and corporate attempts to eliminate data privacy and control.
This is a women's rights issue and an LGB issue now.
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At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy
This Saturday (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks
Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry's shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable.
Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation.
Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements?
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/20/equifax-settles-with-ftc-cfpb-states-and-consumer-class-actions-for-700m/
Equifax's competitors are no better. Experian doxed the nation again, in 2021:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian
It's hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and "race mixers" so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them:
https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans
As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad to "Rural and Barely Making It" consumers, the brokers have you covered:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/13/public-interest-pharma/#axciom
More than 650,000 of these categories exist, allowing advertisers to target substance abusers, depressed teens, and people on the brink of bankruptcy:
https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you
These companies follow you everywhere, including to abortion clinics, and sell the data to just about anyone:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus
There are zillions of these data brokers, operating in an unregulated wild west industry. Many of them have been rolled up into tech giants (Oracle owns more than 80 brokers), while others merely do business with ad-tech giants like Google and Meta, who are some of their best customers.
As bad as these two sectors are, they're even worse in combination – the harms data brokers (sloppy, invasive) inflict on us when they supply credit bureaux (consequential, secretive, intransigent) are far worse than the sum of the harms of each.
And now for some good news. The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, has declared war on this alliance:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/16/cfpb-looks-to-restrict-the-sleazy-link-between-credit-reporting-agencies-and-data-brokers/
They've proposed new rules limiting the trade between brokers and bureaux, under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, putting strict restrictions on the transfer of information between the two:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/15/tech/privacy-rules-data-brokers/index.html
As Karl Bode writes for Techdirt, this is long overdue and meaningful. Remember all the handwringing and chest-thumping about Tiktok stealing Americans' data to the Chinese military? China doesn't need Tiktok to get that data – it can buy it from data-brokers. For peanuts.
The CFPB action is part of a muscular style of governance that is characteristic of the best Biden appointees, who are some of the most principled and competent in living memory. These regulators have scoured the legislation that gives them the power to act on behalf of the American people and discovered an arsenal of action they can take:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff
Alas, not all the Biden appointees have the will or the skill to pull this trick off. The corporate Dems' darlings are mired in #LearnedHelplessness, convinced that they can't – or shouldn't – use their prodigious powers to step in to curb corporate power:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
And it's true that privacy regulation faces stiff headwinds. Surveillance is a public-private partnership from hell. Cops and spies love to raid the surveillance industries' dossiers, treating them as an off-the-books, warrantless source of unconstitutional personal data on their targets:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/16/ring-ring-lapd-calling/#ring
These powerful state actors reliably intervene to hamstring attempts at privacy law, defending the massive profits raked in by data brokers and credit bureaux. These profits, meanwhile, can be mobilized as lobbying dollars that work lawmakers and regulators from the private sector side. Caught in the squeeze between powerful government actors (the true "Deep State") and a cartel of filthy rich private spies, lawmakers and regulators are frozen in place.
Or, at least, they were. The CFPB's discovery that it had the power all along to curb commercial surveillance follows on from the FTC's similar realization last summer:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling
I don't want to pretend that all privacy questions can be resolved with simple, bright-line rules. It's not clear who "owns" many classes of private data – does your mother own the fact that she gave birth to you, or do you? What if you disagree about such a disclosure – say, if you want to identify your mother as an abusive parent and she objects?
But there are so many stupid-simple privacy questions. Credit bureaux and data-brokers don't inhabit any kind of grey area. They simply should not exist. Getting rid of them is a project of years, but it starts with hacking away at their sources of profits, stripping them of defenses so we can finally annihilate them.
I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
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