The FTC takes aim at commercial surveillance

Oh, the sheer poetry of “Commercial Surveillance and Data Security Rulemaking.”

The biggest fallacy in the online privacy is that there is a difference between “state surveillance” and “commercial surveillance.” Bizarrely, it’s a fallacy that is widely held by both government snoops and Big Tech snoops.

Many’s the time I’ve spoken to a DC audience about privacy, only to have an audience member say, “I’m OK with Uncle Sam spying on me — after all, I’ve already given up every sensitive scrap of information about my personal life to the Office of Personnel Management when I applied for security clearance. But I don’t want my money going to Google — those bastards would sell their mothers out for a nickle.”

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, I hear, “I don’t care if Google has my data — they just want to show me better ads. But the US government? Hell no! Those govies and their profiteering private contractor pals are all too stupid to get jobs at real tech companies and who knows what they’re going to do with my data?”

Both groups are gripped by the delusion that state surveillance can be disentangled from commercial surveillance. In a just world, companies would be barred from undertaking mass-scale surveillance for their private gain. After all, this is a practice that imposes vast risks on the public — humiliation, identity theft, extortion, and more — and is only profitable because the companies that create this risk can privatize the benefits of spying and socialize the costs of leaks:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

How is it that the government hasn’t stepped in to force companies to end the practice of spying? Worse, how is it that the government abets spying — for example, by reinforcing the risible fiction that clicking “I agree” on a meandering, multi-thousand word garbage legalese novella constitutes “consent”?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/10/be-reasonable/#i-would-prefer-not-to

It’s because the project of mass state surveillance depends on mass commercial surveillance. Remember the Snowden revelations? Remember how they started with #Prism, a program whereby Big Tech had…