If you’ve ever wondered how your data is being sold to the Feds, and if you have given it a thought, you might not find this surprising. But if you’ve not thought about it, and if you think the internet is as innocent as you are, you’re wrong. Completely, and totally wrong.
Thanks to the complete and huge article from AlterNet clearly explains how all of these large companies are stealing your data and providing it to the Feds at a premium:
Ever played Farmville? Checked into Foursquare? Listened to music on Pandora? These new social apps come with an obvious price tag: the annoying advertisements that we believe to be the fee we have to pay for our pleasure. But there’s a second, more hidden price tag — the reams of data about ourselves that we give away. Just like raw petroleum, it can be refined into many things — the high-octane jet fuel for our social media and the asphalt and tar of our past that we would rather hide or forget.
The author also describes about second type of company, that collects data in a different way:
But there is a second kind of data company of which most people are unaware: high-tech outfits that simply help themselves to our information in order to allow U.S. government agencies to dig into our past and present. Some of this is legal, since most of us have signed away the rights to our own information on digital forms that few ever bother to read, but much of it is, to put the matter politely, questionable.
This second category is made up of professional surveillance companies. They generally work for or sell their products to the government — in other words, they are paid with our tax dollars — but we have no control over them. Harris Corporation provides technology to the FBI to track, via our mobile phones, where we go; Glimmerglass builds tools that the U.S. intelligence community can use to intercept our overseas calls; and companies like James Bimen Associates design software to hack into our computers.
The tracking methods and the Feds’ data hungry behavior does not stop here. Read the entire article on AlterNet to know more about this story.