Your exact location, what apps you use, the last thing you bought online.
Your data is for sale – and the U.S. government is buying it.
Today, On Point: What you need to know about the shadowy world of data collection.
Guests
Byron Tau, journalist. Author of “Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New American Surveillance State.” Currently works at the Albritton Journalism Institute.
Transcript
Part I
DEBORAH BECKER: Many of us have probably had an experience similar to that of On Point listener Christina Hoffman, who lives in California.
CHRISTINA HOFFMAN: So one day I’m listening to music via Alexa Echo and a song came on and I said, “Oh, I love this song. I would have this play at the memorial service for me.” And my daughter says, “Oh, wow.
Yeah. You got to let us know.” I’m young and not dying anytime soon, but we were just chatting. I like to plan all sorts of parties and to the music. The next day, I’m getting ads on Facebook and other things about funeral homes.
BECKER: And Christina says she was freaked out.
CHRISTINA HOFFMAN: I’d never searched anything online about that.
That was just from a conversation in my kitchen. And I didn’t say, “Hey, Alexa, look up funeral homes.” I didn’t even ask for that. It was while music was playing, very strange.
BECKER: And On Point listener Reginal Jaramillo also in California recently learned that the TV streaming company Roku collects and sells information about him.
REGINAL JARAMILLO: The surveillance is ridiculous. I don’t feel like I have anything to hide, but it frustrates me that corporations are able to profit off of our information and that they’re willing to pay basically anyone, but the people themselves for that information. I accidentally bumped into the service and terms agreement of my Roku device.
It’s upsetting me so much when I found out that anytime you plug in a USB device into the Roku, they get access, they get to know what you’re watching and they get ownership of it, in a way. So to some degree, we know we’re being watched, but what most of us don’t know is what happens with our personal data.
BECKER: Maybe we realize some information is being sold to people who will then try to sell us products through targeted ads. But our guest on the show today says our digital footprints are very attractive to the U.S. government, which is buying our data for surveillance. Journalist Byron Tau traces this alliance between government and corporations for our data in his new book titled, “Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government is Creating a New American Surveillance State.”
And he joins us now. Byron, welcome to On Point.
BYRON TAU: Thanks so much for having me.
BECKER: So let’s dig in a little bit into this sort of opaque world of data brokering first. Can you describe how our information is being collected? How much of it is there?
TAU: Sure. So it depends on what type of data broker we’re talking about, but broadly speaking, corporations collect a lot of data on the global population.
That can be everything from address history, to employment to things like marriage records. Those are traditional data broker records. But in recent years, companies have sprung up to scrape social media posts and resell that to companies and governments who are interested in investing in insight about what’s being said on social media. Phones and cars broadcast things like their GPS location.
And there are data brokers that specialize in that. And increasingly today we have this weird world of wireless data. Our Bluetooth headphones emit wireless data. Even our car tires emit wireless data. And believe it or not, there are these data brokers that set up things to collect strange wireless information from devices as they move around the world.
BECKER: So there’s no sort of central repository or anything. Each of these particular brokers might be able to say, that’s the piece I’m looking at and I can resell to this group. And it’s a bunch of different organizations and corporations doing this.
TAU: That’s right. The data broker ecosystem is massive. It includes billion-dollar companies that are sort of household names, companies like Thomson Reuters or LexisNexis. Things that people who have worked in information or in research or in law might have heard of. And then it stretches to small, tiny companies in the D.C. area or in New York City or in San Francisco that broker very esoteric, strange data sets. So it’s a mix of companies of all different sizes and there are hundreds, if not thousands of them.
BECKER: You can certainly understand how this information might be attractive to a corporation. Why is it so attractive to the government, especially because it has all these potential legal pitfalls?
TAU: Sure. So corporations collect this information, because they’re trying to understand the world. They’re trying to understand something better about their consumers. They’re trying to target them a little bit better. They’re trying to identify people who might be interested in their product. And government has a lot of the same drives, right?
Governments, too, want to understand the world. They want to track people who are late on payments, to child support payments. They want to identify people who are criminals. And in the case of intelligence agencies in the military, they may want to do other kinds of targeting.
So governments, like all organizations, are interested in trying to better understand the world around them. And corporate data is a very attractive way to do that. Because by and large it has fewer restrictions on it than when you do something like get a search warrant or when you engage in very intrusive surveillance, you go to a secret court and apply for a spy warrant on someone.
That’s a lot of paperwork. If you buy the data commercially, there’s a lot less privacy restrictions on it and there’s a lot less rules about how you can use it internally inside government.
BECKER: In your book, you quote the work of retired Harvard University professor Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term surveillance capitalism, the practice of tech companies profiting from data.
So yes, understanding the world, but there’s a lot of money to be made here. Let’s listen to a little bit of what Professor Zuboff says.
SHOSHANA ZUBOFF: They understood right from the start, and I mean from the start, going back to the very early 2000s, that as soon as people find out about what’s really going on, they hate it.
They rebel. They resist. They want to hide. They want an alternative. But what’s happened over these past 20 years is those alternatives have disappeared. And so now we find ourselves pretty much trapped. Every internet interface is now a data supply chain.
BECKER: So Byron Tau, is everything a data supply chain?
Is this just another example of capitalism here and really profiting from data?
TAU: I think that’s exactly right. It’s no exaggeration to say that trillions of dollars in corporate wealth are tied up in data collection from big, giant companies like Google and Meta and Apple, to these tiny data brokers that I’m talking about, who cater to the government. Data is huge business and corporations and consumers all participate in this system that underpins a lot of what we do online.
It pays for a lot of what we do online. It is the way we get news, in a lot of cases. It’s the way we get entertaining apps. It’s what pays for our weather app. And it really is a trillion-dollar project to unwind it. If people don’t like this world we’re living in.
BECKER: Yeah. But of course, the question, is it legal?
And is it legal because of that 200-page term, terms of use or agreement that we checked the box on? And does that make it okay?
TAU: Yeah, it’s a great question. So by and large, when governments buy data on citizens, and I’m talking about the U.S. government, but by and large, this reporting that I’ve done applies broadly, it applies to other governments like Russia and China, they also buy data.
But speaking about the rules, when the U.S. government buys data, when we click on some terms of service or we click, I accept when we download an app, we have essentially consented to consumer data collection. And lawyers inside the government have taken the position that if this is data that’s available for sale and that people have agreed to share it with a corporation and then that corporation lawfully makes it available for purchase, then that by and large is legal for the government.
That doesn’t mean the government can do whatever it wants with it. So there are rules on government use of data. And when I say government, I’m speaking broadly, there’s lots of different kinds of government agencies that use this data. But by and large, you’re not supposed to look up your neighbor or your spouse or the person you’re going on a Tinder date with next week.
But by and large, if the government has a lawful mission and it’s purchased data, lawyers have, generally speaking, concluded that this is okay.
BECKER: Basically, I have no expectation of privacy from that data, of my data once I click that box.
TAU: If you’ve shared it with a corporation and that corporation is making it available as part of a commercial transaction and the government is the buyer, then yes, that is the conclusion that a lot of these government lawyers have reached when they’ve looked at questions about whether government agencies can buy data on the population.
BECKER: One of the things that came out in your book that was so surprising to me, one of many, was when you talked about the monitoring of our cars, tire pressure sensors, and you actually tried to buy a car that wouldn’t be monitored. Can you describe that process? Because I thought that was an amazing story.
TAU: Yeah, the Hyundai dealership I walked into had no idea what they were in for when they got me as a customer.
BECKER: (LAUGHS) I bet.
TAU: I was very interested in car privacy because I was in the middle of doing the reporting for this book. And one of the things I had learned was that cars emit radio signals.
Some of those radio signals come from things like your Bluetooth, the thing you pair your phone with, so the infotainment system, that emits a radio signal. But another thing that most people don’t realize is that their car tires actually have a little wireless sensor in them. And that’s the way that your car, when you start it up in the morning, knows what the tire pressure is. And might tell you, “Hey, it’s cold today. Your tire pressure is low.”
That’s actually a radio signal that can be intercepted if you know where and how to listen for it. So very clever government intelligence agencies have developed these sensors that do it. There are companies that actually take advantage of this technology to monitor traffic flows through construction zones, so cars can be tracked through these wireless emissions in their car tires. And cars can be tracked through the wireless emissions that come off the entertainment system.
And in addition, cars, as the New York Times recently reported, are also collecting a lot of GPS data through the infotainment system, that the car salesman tries to upsell you on when you’re in the dealership. And that information is often available for sale. In fact, General Motors was making it available to certain data brokers who were then making it available to insurance companies.
And then people’s rates got jacked, because their car was monitoring how they drove. And so cars are one of many technologies today that emits all sorts of data. And data brokers or government agencies, or the right kind of sensor can pick up that data as you move around the world.
BECKER: And so were you able to get a car that wouldn’t track you?
TAU: I was able to get a car without the infotainment system that has the GPS or the roadside assistance, but you really can’t get a car, a reputable dealership will not rip out the infotainment system or rip the tire pressure sensors off your car. Because they’re a safety mechanism.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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