Trump’s CFPB kills data broker rule
“No longer necessary or appropriate.”
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me at PITTSBURGH’S White Whale Books TONIGHT (May 15) and in PDX at Barnes and Noble with BUNNIE HUANG on June 20. More tour stops (London, Manchester) here.
Something amazing happened from 2020–2024: even as parts of the Biden administration were encouraging genocide and covering up the president’s senescence, a small collection of little-regarded agencies were taking a wrecking ball to corporate power, approaching antitrust and consumer protection with a vigor not seen in generations.
One of the most effective agencies during those years was the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. Under the direction of Rohit Chopra, the CFPB finally used its long-dormant powers to rein in the most egregious and abusive conduct of America’s most predatory corporations, like banks, fintech, and repeat corporate offenders, with a 7–2 Supreme Court mandate to go hard:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism
As impressive as the whole CFPB agenda was, the standout for me was its attack on America’s data brokerage industry. Data brokers are effectively totally unregulated, and they buy and sell every intimate fact of your life. The reason every device in your life — smart speaker, car, toothbrush, thermostate — spies on you all the time is because data brokers will buy any data from anyone and sell it to anyone, too.
Data brokerages put “surveillance capitalist” companies like Google and Meta to shame (indeed, Big Tech buys a lot of data from brokerages, as do agencies like the DEA, ICE and the FBI, who treat the brokerages as a warrant-free, off-the-books mass surveillance system). Data brokerages combine data about your movements, purchases, friends, medical problems, education, love life, and more, and bucket you into categories that marketers (or scammers) can buy access to. There are over 650,000 of these categories, including “seniors with dementia,” “depressed teenagers” and “US military personnel with gambling problems”:
Congress hasn’t passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988’s Video Privacy Protection Act. The last technological privacy issue your legislature considered important enough to address was the scourge of video-store clerks telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
Congress’s massive failure created equally massive risks for the rest of us. From phishing and ransomware attacks to identity theft to stalking and SWATting, America’s privacy nihilism enabled mass-scale predation upon all of us, rich and poor, old and young, rural and urban, men and women, racialized and white.
That’s the void that the CFPB stepped into last summer, when they passed a new rule that would effectively shut down the entire data brokerage industry:
Yesterday, Trump’s CFPB boss, Russell Vought, killed that rule, stating that it was “no longer necessary or appropriate”:
https://www.wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-kills-rule-to-shield-americans-from-data-brokers/
Here’s the thing: Trumpism relies on the fusion of two groups of people: a tiny number of oligarchs, and millions of everyday people who are constantly victimized by those oligarchs. To get this latter group of Christmas-voting turkeys to stay in the coalition, Trump needs to delivery something that keeps them happy. Mostly, Trump delivers negative things to keep them happy — the spectacle of public cruelty to immigrants, women, trans people, academics, etc. There is a certain libidinal satisfaction that comes from watching your enemies suffer — but you can’t eat schadenfreude. You can’t make rent or put braces on your kids’ teeth or pay your medical bills with the sadistic happiness you feel when you hear the sobs of people you’ve been taught to despise.
For Trump to keep the turkeys voting for Christmas, he needs to do something for them. He can’t just do things to scapegoats. But America’s eminently guillotineable oligarchs have found so many ways to turn working peoples’ torment into riches, and they are so greedy and unwilling to give up any of those grifts, that Trump can’t manage to deliver anything positive to his base. Last week, his FTC killed the “click to cancel” rule that required companies that tricked you into buying subscriptions to make it easy for you to cancel them:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole
There isn’t a single person in the Trump base who isn’t harmed by data brokers. Every red-hat-wearing MAGA footsoldier has been swindled with a recurring-payment scam by clicking a deceptive link. The material conditions of the lives of Trump’s base — already in severe jeopardy thanks to the massive inflation the tariffs will cause, and the plummeting wages that the ensuing mass business-closures will bring about — cannot be improved in any way.
I don’t think anyone knows for sure how much support Trump can win solely by torturing the people his supporters hate, even as those supporters’ lives get worse and worse. The one thing I’m sure of, though, is that it’s less support than Trump would get if he could do something — anything — to make their lives even a little better.
Trump owes his success to coalition-building. The Trumpist agenda — ripoffs and racism and rape — has been around forever, in festering pockets like the John Birch Society, but those feverish monsters were encysted by the body politic and kept away from power. When a group of people who’ve been unsuccessfully trying to do something for a long time suddenly attain success, the most likely explanation is that they have found coalition partners to join them in their push.
Every coalition is brittle, because coalition partners want different things (if you want the same thing, you’re just a group — “coalitions” are, definitionally, made up of people who want different things). They have shared goals, sure, but some of the things that some of the coalition partners want are things that the other partners totally reject. When one partner wins, the other partners lose. Trump’s been good at holding together his coalition, but he’s running up against some hard limits.
Here’s what Naomi Klein told Cerise Castle from Capital & Main/The American Prospect:
The most serious vulnerability that Trump has is that a large part of his base really hates Silicon Valley and is not interested in being replaced by machines. So it’s a monumental bait-and-switch that Trump has done with this immediate alignment with the billionaire class in Silicon Valley, and if the left can’t exploit that, then we’re doing something wrong.`
https://prospect.org/culture/2025-05-13-moment-of-unparalleled-peril-interview-naomi-klein/
Killing the CFPB’s data broker rule is a pure transfer from the Trump base to Silicon Valley oligarchs, whose hunger for our private data know no bounds.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/15/asshole-to-appetite/#ssn-for-sale
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
