ONE NATION, TRACKED

[brooklynite]

New York Times

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.

After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan.

One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight. Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.

[bdamomma]

1. K&R

nt

[Newest Reality]

2. Tip of the iceburg!

We have large corporations now who are monopolizing much of the new technology that is emerging in computing, AI, automation, biotechnology, etc.

Consider what you would think if a country right next to yours was accumulating massive armaments of every kind in amounts that would be considered insanely extreme and dangerous. Well, that's the analogy to what Google, Amazon, Apple, etc., are doing. The data and its acquisition that is in progress, combined with the accelerated emergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is now underway is going to turn the tables upside down, inside out and then make them a fourth-dimensional construct, so to speak.

Without regulation and anti-trust considerations, these companies are situated in the new war rooms of power, transformed politics and economy and in a position to wrest control of what we do, how we do it, what we think, etc. That is by no means an exaggeration. This is the next frontier of struggle for freedom and democracy as we know it and it is well underway.

In an age of information, knowledge should be our real civic duty because both transcend politics more than ever now. Do not rely on the mainstream media to put too much emphasis on the immanence or importance of this new phase.

[world wide wally]

3. This is one example of the "regulations" Trump has removed.

The deplorables think of regulations like helmet laws and lawn watering days as "deregulation" but mostly, the regulations being eliminated were put in place to protect people and to keep corporations in check. So now, we are all fair game.
It's like Republicans cheering the anti tort law speeches when they have no idea whatsoever what tort laws are.