The Iron Law and Abuse

I’ve written many times about the iron law of data collection. Briefly, it’s the notion that whenever data is collected

  1. No matter the original rationale given for its collection, new uses will be found for the data.
  2. The data will eventually be abused.

I don’t have any actual figures but it’s pretty clear that the worst offenders are our own governments. A typical example is a government taking a blood sample from newborns to screen for a dangerous genetic disease. Years later the police start accessing the data for criminal investigations. Back when I wrote the above post, I naively assumed that in the U.S., at least, this type of thing couldn’t happen. Sadly, age has disabused me of such rosy ideas.

The latest example involves the IRS buying cell phone location data from data brokers. The data is collected by, say, a weather app that needs your location to deliver the local weather. Then it gets sold to companies like Venntel that curate the information and resell it to the government. The problem is that the US Supreme Court has already ruled that significant use of phone location data requires a warrant. The IRS is buying the data from a private source to avoid fourth amendment prohibitions.

There you see it: the iron law in action. The data is used for unintended purposes and finally abused by our own government to circumvent constitutional protections. The IRS for its part is refusing to justify its actions or provide the legal reasoning it used to procure the data. In this case, Senator Ron Wyden has promised to introduce legislation outlawing this type of abuse but we can rest assured that new abuses will pop up to replace it.

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