from the corruption-is-deadly dept
There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn’t pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despite a parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congress is too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this privacy dysfunction to dodge domestic surveillance warrants.
If we imposed safeguards on consumer data, everybody from app makers to telecoms would make billions less per quarter. So our corrupt lawmakers pretend the vast human harms of our greed are a distant and unavoidable externality. Unless the privacy issues involve some kid tracking rich people on their planes, of course, in which case Congress moves with a haste that breaks the sound barrier.
Despite this, the Biden era saw some modest progress in holding dodgy data brokers accountable for routinely over-collecting sensitive user location and behavior data, then selling it to any random idiot with few nickels to rub together (like far right wing propagandists, or authoritarian governments).
But that minimal progress is now, of course, being unwound by the Trump administration. For example, the Trump Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is quietly killing an effort to implement new rules on how data brokers sell sensitive information about Americans, including financial data, credit history, and Social Security numbers.
The new rule was proposed last December under former director Rohit Chopra. It would have allowed the CFPB to police dodgy data brokers under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), limiting their ability to traffic in financial data, credit scores, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, and addresses. Chopra, at the time, noted that this data often winds up in the hands of foreign intelligence agencies.
But Wired notes how the lobotomized agency, now under the “leadership” of acting director and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, quietly withdrew the proposal last week, publishing a notice in the Federal Register declaring the rule no longer “necessary or appropriate.”
As Wired hints, the impact goes well beyond inane policy debates, and is likely to be potentially fatal for many Americans:
“Russell Vought is undoing years of painstaking, bipartisan work in order to prop up data brokers’ predatory, and profitable, surveillance of Americans,” says Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, a nonprofit that supported the rule. Added Vitka: “By withdrawing the CFPB’s data broker rulemaking, the Trump administration is ensuring that Americans will continue to be bombarded by scam texts, calls and emails, and that military members and their families can be targeted by spies and blackmailers.”
Senator Ron Wyden documented last year how far-right zealots were able to buy the location data of women seeking abortions and then use it to target vulnerable women with right wing propaganda. Lax oversight of wireless company monetization of location data has resulted in this data getting into the hands of stalkers and sexual predators. This corruption has real world costs.
Everywhere you look, Trump and his courts are making it easier for criminals and predatory scumbags to abuse this data. The Trump-stocked 5th Circuit, for example, recently vacated a $57 million fine against AT&T for collecting and selling sensitive user location data to data brokers without informing consumers. Auto giants have also been abusing sensitive data to jack up your insurance rates without telling you.
These are very real harms impacting everyone, regardless of partisan ideology. But instead of shoring up oversight of this sector, we’re rushing in the exact opposite direction, both by killing already modest efforts at new rules, and gutting federal regulatory ability to craft and enforce new ones. That leaves privacy reform in the hands of a well-lobbied Congress that’s too corrupt to function.
This is all occurring in an era where people are sharing more sensitive data than ever with their apps — and even AI therapists or sexbots. Opening the door to the kind of potentially deadly privacy invasions even the most alarmist of activists have yet to even dream of.
Filed Under: cfpb, corruption, data brokers, donald trump, hacking, location data, privacy, russell vought, security
