This Company Has Built a Profile on Every American Adult
January 24th, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Every move you make. Every click you take. Every game you play. Every place you stay. They’ll be watching you.
Forget telephoto lenses and fake mustaches: The most important tools for America’s 35,000 private investigators are database subscription services. For more than a decade, professional snoops have been able to search troves of public and nonpublic records—known addresses, DMV records, photographs of a person’s car—and condense them into comprehensive reports costing as little as $10. Now they can combine that information with the kinds of things marketers know about you, such as which politicians you donate to, what you spend on groceries, and whether it’s weird that you ate in last night, to create a portrait of your life and predict your behavior.
IDI, a year-old company in the so-called data-fusion business, is the first to centralize and weaponize all that information for its customers. The Boca Raton, Fla., company’s database service, idiCORE, combines public records with purchasing, demographic, and behavioral data. Chief Executive Officer Derek Dubner says the system isn’t waiting for requests from clients—it’s already built a profile on every American adult, including young people who wouldn’t be swept up in conventional databases, which only index transactions. “We have data on that 21-year-old who’s living at home with mom and dad,” he says.
The private dick game takes a sinister turn. Still, this is softball compared to the PRISM simulations. WTF happened to the 4th Amendment?
http://a54.idata.over-blog.com/2/37/80/12/Grand-format-calvin-et-hobbes/TracerBullet.jpg
Since the Pinkerton cop days, the private dick game has always been this sinister. I would honestly say that the private databases are larger and more dangerous than the NSA’s stuff, which genuinely has a national security focus (regardless of how broadly people in that loop tend to define that focus). Never forget that the CIA and U.S. Intelligence Community outsourced their cloud computing to Amazon and not the other way around: http://blackbag.gawker.com/amazon-is-the-scariest-part-of-the-cias-new-amazon-clo-1605847721
Amazon’s annual profits dwarf the CIA’s known annual budget. The tide turned in the 1990s, when the post-Cold War budget cuts were happening in tandem with the rise of Silicon Valley and their massive data collection campaigns. That tide never turned back. The intel community colludes with them, offers them money via In-Q-Tel for a taste of the new goods, etc. The power dynamic is perversely the opposite of what would make sense.