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:
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?
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Hi, bitches! I was recently victim of identity theft and someone opened a credit card in my name. Luckily Credit Karma and Experian emailed me about hard credit inquiries and I was able to get the card canceled before it was used. I think I’ve done what I can- froze all credit, have a fraud alert, police and FTC reports, the whole shebang. Do you have any extra advice for this situation? xx thanks, love your blog and advice!
Oh honey!!! That fucking sucks. We're so proud of you for keeping your chin up and taking the necessary steps to recover.
We wrote a lot about how to handle identity theft back during the Equifax data breach, so check out this article for our advice:
The Equifax Data Breach and Identity Theft: Dafuq Just Happened?
Experian hit with €2.7M GDPR fine over secret data harvesting
The Dutch privacy regulator fined Experian after finding it secretly built credit profiles on millions by pulling personal data from public and private sources without consent, influencing loans and deposits across the Netherlands.
Nothing will radicalize you faster than spending All Day™️ being passed around the 3 credit reporting agencies’ information dispute lines like a dirty bong until you’re hanging onto sanity by willpower & fanfiction alone 🙂
Comparably ranked the best companies for women to work at in 2021 based on more than 15 million ratings from current female employees across
What are the best companies to work for if you’re a woman?
The answer to this question has become especially pertinent as working women continue to navigate the coronavirus pandemic: multiple studies have shown that women are reporting higher levels of burnout than men and taking on more caregiving responsibilities while balancing their jobs.
Women continue to earn less than men, too, as women working full-time in the United States are still paid 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man, according to the Department of Labor.Comparably, a workplace culture and compensation platform, has ranked the best companies for women to work at in 2021 based on more than 15 million ratings from current female employees across 70,000 companies.Ratings were written between November 2020 and November 2021, and answered questions about career growth, compensation, benefits and other topics for each organization. Sample questions included “Do you feel burnt out at work?” and “Do you believe you’re paid fairly?”
The top large companies for women have several important traits in common including competitive parental leave policies and a clear commitment to diversity and inclusion, as well as female leadership, Jason Nazar, co-founder and CEO of Comparably, tells CNBC Make It.
“Organizations, as a whole, are improving their environments for female employees compared to three, five years ago,” Nazar says. “But more companies need to take action and make changes to their pay policies, benefits and hiring practices to retain women.”
He adds: “Employees are not expecting perfection, they just want to see a true commitment to improvement — and I think when people see that happen, they feel really good about where their company is at and want to be part of that change, too.”Here are the top 10 large companies for women to work at, according to Comparably:
1. IBM
Industry: TechnologyLocation: Armonk, New YorkEmployee Feedback: “At IBM a woman is free to express her opinion, and express interest in taking on a work item without fear of being shut down. It’s a wonderful place for women to work that is full of real opportunities for women to contribute.”
2. Experian
Industry: FinanceLocation: Costa Mesa, CaliforniaEmployee Feedback: “I appreciate the different benefits, the ERGs and the support they give to women. And also that they understand the current situation and how it affects families and therefore our work.”
3. Adobe
Industry: TechnologyLocation: San Jose, CaliforniaEmployee Feedback: “We have lots of leaders committed to iterating programs and policies that will benefit all employees, especially women and underrepresented groups at the company.”
4. HubSpot
Industry: TechnologyLocation: Cambridge, MassachusettsEmployee Feedback: “Women leaders at HubSpot actively seek to support, empower, and celebrate other women.”
5. Medallia
Industry: TechnologyLocation: San Francisco, CaliforniaEmployee Feedback: “They promote people from within and continually support women in leadership roles.”
6. Insight Global
Industry: Staffing/RecruitingLocation: Atlanta, GeorgiaEmployee Feedback: “I truly look up to the female leadership in this company. These women are powerful!”
7. Boston Consulting Group
Industry: ConsultingLocation: Boston, MassachusettsEmployee Feedback: “I don’t need to worry about my benefits covering me and my family. For example, my health insurance plan has no premiums, no deductible, and very low co-pays.”
8. ArcBest
Industry: TransportationLocation: Fort Smith, ArkansasEmployee Feedback: “I like the transparency they provide and the mix of men and women that serve on our leadership team.”
9. Microsoft
Industry: TechnologyLocation: Redmond, WashingtonEmployee Feedback: “Fertility treatments, adoption fees, housekeeping, fitness and office equipment — anything to support quality of life as a well rounded professional. Too much to list, it’s incredible.”
10. The Knot Worldwide
Industry: TechnologyLocation: Chevy Chase, MarylandEmployee Feedback: “I love working on a team full of smart, hardworking, collaborative women! Here, everyone working on the go-to-market team genuinely works hard to be supportive and collaborative.”
