Free Data and Goliath by Bruce Schneier Page A

it systematically over
     the years, regularly updating its privacy policy to obtain more access to your data
     and give you less privacy. Facebook has also changed its default settings so that
     more people can see your name, photo, wall posts, photos you post, Likes, and so on.
     Google has done much the same. In 2012, it announced a major change: Google would
     link its data about you from search, Gmail, YouTube (which Google owns), Google Plus,
     and so on into one large data set about you.
    Apple is somewhat of an exception here. The company exists to market consumer products,
     and although it could spy on iCloud users’ e-mail, text messages, calendar, address
     book, and photos, it does not. It uses iTunes purchaseinformation only to suggest other songs and videos a user might want to buy. In late
     2014, it started using this as a market differentiator.
    Convenience is the other reason we willingly give highly personal data to corporate
     interests, and put up with becoming objects of their surveillance. As I keep saying,
     surveillance-based services are useful and valuable. We like it when we can access
     our address book, calendar, photographs, documents, and everything else on any device
     we happen to be near. We like services like Siri and Google Now, which work best when
     they know tons about you. Social networking apps make it easier to hang out with our
     friends. Cell phone apps like Google Maps, Yelp, Weather, and Uber work better and
     faster when they know our location. Letting apps like Pocket or Instapaper know what
     we’re reading feels like a small price to pay for getting everything we want to read
     in one convenient place. We even like it when ads are targeted to exactly what we’re
     interested in. The benefits of surveillance in these and other applications are real,
     and significant.
    We especially don’t mind if a company collects our data and uses it within its own
     service to better serve us. This is why Amazon recommendations are rarely mentioned
     when people complain about corporate surveillance. Amazon constantly recommends things
     for you to buy based on the things you’ve bought and the things other people have
     bought. Amazon’s using your data in the same context it was collected, and it’s completely
     transparent to the user. It’s very big business for Amazon, and people largely accept
     it. They start objecting, though, when their data is bought, sold, and used without
     their knowledge or consent.
    THE DATA BROKER INDUSTRY
    Customer surveillance is much older than the Internet. Before the Internet, there
     were four basic surveillance streams. The first flowed from companies keeping records
     on their customers. This was a manufacturing supply company knowing what its corporate
     customers order, and who does the ordering. This was Nordstrom remembering its customers’
     sizes and the sorts of tailoring they like, and airlines and hotels keeping track
     of their frequent customers. Eventually this evolved into the databases that enable
     companies to track their sales leads all the way from initial inquiry tofinal purchase, and retail loyalty cards, which offer consumers discounts but whose
     real purpose is to track their purchases. Now lots of companies offer Customer Relationship
     Management, or CRM, systems to corporations of all sizes.
    The second traditional surveillance stream was direct marketing. Paper mail was the
     medium, and the goal was to provide companies with lists of people who wanted to receive
     the marketing mail and not waste postage on people who did not. This was necessarily
     coarse, based on things like demographics, magazine subscriptions, or customer lists
     from related enterprises.
    The third stream came from credit bureaus. These companies collected detailed credit
     information about people, and sold that information to banks trying to determine whether
     to give individuals loans and at what rates. This has always been a relatively