 Ever have the uncanny feeling that as soon as you voice an interest in a consumer item – a vacation destination, a tie or a scarf, an exotic coffee – an ad for that very item appears in your social media feed? Are our phones listening to us and reporting what we say in private conversations to advertisers? The Electronic Frontier Foundation explores this question in this short video along with a factsheet. While EFF says our phones are probably not listening to us, the mechanisms behind this phenomena of coincidental ads are no less disturbing: As EFF observes, it isn’t just advertisers that are buying our digital lives from data brokers. The federal government is also buying this same intrusive data gleaned from our social media interests and apps. This is the worst violation of our privacy, one that comes from a federal government that has the power to raid our homes and charge us with crimes on the basis of personal information acquired without a warrant. All the more reason to urge your U.S. Senators to follow the example of the U.S. House of Representatives and pass The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would require federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain probable cause warrants – as required by the U.S. Constitution – before examining our purchased data. Comments are closed.
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