The above line comes from Kaiser Fung in the context of this story, which is horrifying not so much in its details–lots more horrifying things are happening in wars around the world–but in how openly it’s all being done:
The FTC has “settled” with OKCupid, which is a dating app owned by the Match group, on giving data to a face recognition company (Clarifai, a competitor of Clearview) without proper notification to its users (link).
I [Kaiser] put “settled” in quotes because throughout the story of the data belonging to Americans, the meaning of many words has been warped beyond recognition. This is, as Ars Technica pointed out in its header, a “settlement” without any financial penalty. . . .
The FTC claimed it knew what happened: based on the passage quoted by Ars Technica, it appeared that they merely repeated the story told by OKCupid, Match, and Clarifai. They claimed that no formal agreement existed but disclosed that the founder of OKCupid and the CEO of Match were both “financially invested” in Clarifai. These parties somehow believed that this cover story gave them a get-out-of-jail card, a rationale to support their use of the word “sharing”. In fact, this is even more troubling than if a straightforward commercial agreement were to exist.
For one, this story proves that user data at tech companies are at the hands of individuals. (We already sort of knew from some past actions e.g. by Elon Musk.) It also shows that these individuals – none of whom face any kind of sanctions – will sell out their users for personal financial gain. When no agreement exists, it’s harder to trace where, when and what data have left the building. . . .
This settlement stemmed from actions that took place in 2014, so it took 12 years for regulators to uphold the law by a friendly handshake with the offenders. . . .
Let’s read the terms of the settlement carefully, shall we? Hold on to your seat belts, this is truly scary:
OKCupid and Match… agreed to a permanent prohibition barring them from misrepresenting how they use and share personal data.
Wait, so businesses are heretofore not prohibited from “misrepresenting how they use and share personal data”? It takes 12 years and a negotiated settlement to confirm to Americans that our businesses are in fact free to misrepresent how they use and share personal data – unless the FTC imposes a specific “permanent” ban from lying?
I’m not the first person to note that white collar crime is basically legal now.
P.S. Way back when, OK Cupid had a blog! I guess that you can make cool graphs (there were more here but the links no longer work) while still misrepresenting how you use and sell, or share, personal data.
As much as the obvious economic costs of this administration are discussed — tariffs, war and the like — an underappreciated consequence of the blatant corruption may be a loss of entrepreneurship. The lure of the US is the rule of law, and the trust that palms don’t need to be greased to get ahead (the truth of that is questionable, but speaking as someone who’s lived most of their life overseas, that’s what I’ve observed). I would be wary of recession if companies think they can just manipulate the market rather than compete.
The actual business has been advertising for the stock for quite some time now. And the government is the ultimate buyer of all this private data, its not going to be implementing any meaningful protections.
Its crazy to see people act like this is new, or something to be blamed on “this administration”.
It is also crazy to pretend that this administration is simply doing the same things as prior administrations. The swamp may have been drained, but it has been repopulated by new, uglier, and more numerous creatures. Now, in anticipation of your response, I don’t have evidence to support this claim but I also don’t believe you can provide such evidence. There are plenty of anecdotes of past and present abuses of government regulatory misdeeds, but good data on the past and present extent to which the federal government is used as a tool to enrich private entities will be hard to come by. I hope people will try to do so, because I believe this is critically important. But I think it is dangerous to think that current actions by this administration are simply business as usual – at least without citing more than stories of past abuses (of which there are too many).
I came across the following from a succesful grant proposal if I am understanding correctly. It was redacted in places which is where I am putting “(…)” in the following copied text here. I’m still scratching my head concerning how to interpret the following, but perhaps this is something fitting for the discussion here:
“(…) has an enormous amount of person-level linkable statistical data available. Labour market and education data of the total Dutch population are available to researchers affiliated with Dutch universities In the secure remote access environment hosted by (…) . This information includes – among others – exam grades, highest diploma, labour market status and most important income source (e.g. employment status, sick leave, social benefit, entrepreneur), wage, and job sector. It is furthermore possible to reconstruct and retrieve this information for entire families. Linking the (…) and (…) data to the (…) creates the opportunity to compare persons with and without autism with otherwise similar background characteristics.”
Can we add academia and (some) scientists to OKCupid and governments as entities that collect or use data in a manner that could be seen as questionable or even bad from certain perspectives?
“Can we add academia and (some) scientists to OKCupid and governments as entities that collect or use data in a manner that could be seen as questionable or even bad from certain perspectives?”
Wasn’t there some recent DARPA sponsored large scale replication project publihsed recently? Maybe entities like DARPA or some “philanthropists” are making friends with certain (kinds of) scientists by handing out grants to them. Maybe it could be a way to try and get some large data collections going which they can access and use. Perhaps using participants from many different countries, or perhaps sponoring certain research about certain topics, or something like that.
It might just take a handful of psychopathic psychological scientists (of which there might be many available), or a handful of overenthusiastic “let’s collaborate and waste many resources”-folks, or a handful of “scientism”-floks who definitely have the knowlegdge and right to steer things in a certain direction, or a handful of “well if I am receiving a nice grant I am willing to collaborate with just about anyone” to try and set up a continuous stream of data flowing through some platform or something like that….
That is, untill other psychological scientists, and perhaps others in general, won’t collaborate with such entities anymore and won’t use their platform anymore and won’t use who knows what “improvements in workflow” nonsense they can come up with anymore.
The abuses at the end of Trump’s first term into Biden’s were far worse than anything going on now.
This was only a few years ago and was the greatest wealth and power transfer (from people to corporations) in history. You should still be suffering from the inflation caused by all the money printing.
Anoneuoid
Once again, you are not staying on point and inviting expansion of this blog discussion into discussion of all economic and political issues. Perhaps you see government spending programs as part of the same fabric as government policy regarding competition policy and FTC investigation of the use of private information (the subject of the post) – but I do not. Of course, these are all government actions and thereby not unrelated. But tying them together they way you do undermines understanding. The only conclusion from your approach must be that government is totally corrupt, leaving us with what choice? Anarchy?
I prefer to view current government corrupt practices – deals such as the original post above is about, as well as the administration’s involvement in media and technology mergers and administrative officials connections to private business interests – as somewhat distinct from policies at the end of Trumps’ first term and Biden’s presidency. These latter policies were enacted during the COVID crisis and were ill-conceived in many ways (though I am reluctant to abuse the benefits of hindsight when so much was uncertain at the time). Many government programs are designed in ways that invite abuse and fraud and I believe we are seeing how true that is. But I don’t think they were deliberate attempts to enrich private interests – unlike many of the actions of the current administration.
I detect you are also referring to the Fed actions and your views of how our banking system works. I’d rather not rehash those as I don’t agree with your past views of how “money” is created and its macroeconomic implications. But the important point – for me, at least – is that those issues about the function of the Federal Reserve seem far removed from issues of FTC settlement of claims regarding use of “private” information as well as issues of current administration contracting with private entities for military hardware (e.g. drones), media contracts, technology contracts, etc. as well as pardons for financial contributors to pet projects, as well as administrative pressure on virtually all sectors of the economy,….
We fundamentally disagree on the extent to which the current administration is simply a continuation of past patterns (or even pales in comparisons of severity of abuse). I don’t deny that there are atrocious examples of past government abuse and corruption. But they seem more systemic to me – when government gets large, a number of abusive patterns are likely to emerge (although I don’t think this implies that smaller government is necessarily better – much of the reason why government grows is in response to modern realities of technology and trade). The current administrative actions seem much more like Mafia actions and Banana Republics. I think they are of a different kind than the systemic issues that arise from large scale government programs designed to address crises. The problem with lumping everything together is that there seems to be nothing that can be done to address any abuses.
I think our differences are more about “enumerating badness” vs making a whitelist of things the government should be allowed to do. I don’t often see this concept outside infosec, but it applies widely:
https://privsec.dev/posts/knowledge/badness-enumeration/
Listing all the bad things this administration does vs the previous is only going to waste a lot of time to generate a dataset open to interpretation.
Instead, the idea is to limit what the government gets involved in to a very few things that are easy for anyone to monitor for themselves. And giving corporations access to a special legal system is one of those things it should not be allowed to do.
Anoneuoid
I get your point and agree that enumerating bads will not get us anywhere. But the scale is unprecedented: there is hardly a high administrative official that does not have profound conflicts of interest – particularly at the highest levels. The termination and casting aside of career experts is also unprecedented, at least in my lifetime. The threat of blanket immunity (via pardons) for all close to the White House removes any vestige of accountability – and I have little doubt that such pardons will be coming. This is not business as usual. But I agree that ridding ourselves of these bad actors will not solve the problems. It is only a first step, but a necessary one. Without profound changes in our political system, those that replace the current administration may only be marginally better. Campaign finance reform is high on my list of necessary changes. Establishing more direct exchanges of ideas (more like the British system) is also a priority. Decreasing the scope of government is more questionable for me. Many government programs exist because there was a real need.
“And giving corporations access to a special legal system is one of those things it should not be allowed to do.”
I agree with you entirely about that.