Privacy and the Government

In this chapter, our textbook goes into detail about the government's roles in protecting the citizens' privacy.The text also continues by describing numerous occasions where the US government has violated the same privacy it was supposed to protect.

The Social Dilemma offers an important reminder that there are numerous databases storing extensive amounts of personal information about millions of internet users. Those databases are used to create predictive models for each individual user, which is only feasible when the models have large amounts of data to sift through. In The Social Dilemma, Facebook's former Operations Manager said:

" All of the data that we're just pouring out all the time, is being fed into these systems that have almost no human supervision and that are making better and better predictions about what we are going to do and who we are. [2]
From a Fourth Amendment standpoint, these companies' usage of predictive models is not illegal. The Fourth Amendment "is to protect people’s right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable intrusions by the government. However, the Fourth Amendment does not guarantee protection from all searches and seizures, but only those done by the government" [1] Protections provided by the Fourth Amendment have beeninterpreted to apply only to the government, and not to private organizations.

While the content of these databases does not violate the Fourth Amendment, they may constitute a violation of the Code of Fair Information Practices. Technically this Code applies only to the United States government. Any data collection by private organizations is not held to the same standard. However, historical precedents have shown that US government agencies can request, demand, or steal data from the private sector. Our textbook includes examples of the NSA's predecessor accessng private metadata from major telegram companies back in the 1940s. While laws have changed since then, there is still a loophole in the Privacy Act of 1974 allowing the government to access databases whose premise violates the standards established in Code of Fair Information Practices. To be specific, two Code standards established in the Code are violated:

The extensive personal information stored by Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook do not follow these guidelines. Debacles in past decade have shown that these companies sometimes fall short of the expectaion that they "take precautions to prevent misuses of the data". In addition, these companies' business model requires a great deal of secrecy. End users are not made privy to the data these organizations store about them. While we might assume these personal details are kept internal, AI and Big Data journalist Kalev Leetaru details the significant interest that government agencies, namely the NSA, have in accessing these private, personal details:

" The datasets of greatest interest to intelligence agencies are no longer government-owned or produced. They are created and owned by private companies and must be purchased, hacked or legally compelled. Look closely at the Edward Snowden disclosures and a great deal of the NSA’s global monitoring intake originates within the data centers and telecommunications networks of the world’s private corporations." [3]

(Things to add to the analysis:)

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