Today’s links At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans’ privacy: The CFPB rejects the learned helplessness of generations of regulators. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans’ privacy (permalink) Privacy raises some thorny, subtle and complex issues. It also raises some stupid-simple ones. The American surveillance industry’s shell-game is founded on the deliberate confusion of the two, so that the most modest and sensible actions are posed as reductive, simplistic and unworkable. Two pillars of the American surveillance industry are credit reporting bureaux and data brokers. Both are unbelievably sleazy, reckless and dangerous, and neither faces any real accountability, let alone regulation. Remember Equifax, the company that doxed every adult in America and was given a mere wrist-slap, and now continues to assemble nonconsensual dossiers on every one of us, without any material oversight improvements? https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/20/equifax-settles-with-ftc-cfpb-states-and-consumer-class-actions-for-700m/ Equifax’s competitors are no better. Experian doxed the nation again, in 2021: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox-the-world/#experian It’s hard to overstate how fucking scummy the credit reporting world is. Equifax invented the business in 1899, when, as the Retail Credit Company, it used private spies to track queers, political dissidents and “race mixers” so that banks and merchants could discriminate against them: https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans As awful as credit reporting is, the data broker industry makes it look like a paragon of virtue. If you want to target an ad…Pluralistic: At long last, a meaningful step to protect Americans' privacy (16 August 2023)