I feel like Ars left out the end of the title: “…with your tax dollars.”
I guess it was implied though.
I feel like I shouldn’t be shocked by this. I feel this is kind of obvious that if there’s data for sale then intelligence agencies which just buy it.
Another reason to move away from companies that harvest and sell your data as much as possible.
The wakeup really is not whether it is the NSA or anyone else buying the data, it’s about the companies providing the data to the data brokers, who on-sell it. I, just this week, reported a company who state don Google Play Store that they don’t send data to 3rd parties, and where in their Privacy Policy on their website state in numerous places where and how they send data to 3rd parties (they actually use the words 3rd parties). I also sent them an e-mail highlighting the contradiction.
The fact is they rely on us not digging any deeper than the superficial statement. Whatsapp and Facebook do really deep level metadata analysis, yet they focus only on actual message content not being harvested. It is smoke and mirrors…
That was a good reminder to request my old Pokémon Go account and data to be deleted. Cheers.
The NSA benefits greatly from knowing how many Pidgeys you’ve got, you’re right
As well as the the important number of Pidgeys, they also get the locations on where exactly to find said Pidgeys/me.
