I wonder how a different tactic would fare:

1. Buy some legit(ish) dataset for marketing purposes. I hear DMVs in the US like to sell people's data.

2. Do a direct marketing job: send every single person in the dataset a snail mail letter with a printout of all the data you have on them, and a reference to where you got it from. I hear USPS offers good rates for bulk spam campaigns; they apparently live off it.

That sounds like something that is in range of crowdfunding money, could possibly be fully legal, and sidesteps the issue of news outlets killing the message, with (as I recently heard) their policy of not reporting data from leaked datasets.

This would cause so much chaos and probably result in thousands of divorces. Maybe we could get a lawyers group to front the money lol.

Man, that would be great. I'll bet it'd be doable for anyone whose name is tied to public records via home ownership too

Scale up what they did to Trump for this NY Times piece: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/locat...

See if people keep clicking "Allow" on their phone games after that goes out..

Of course, what'd actually happen is everyone would just attack the messenger. Maybe there'd be some super half-assed knee-jerk law thrown into place

If I ever get terminal cancer I'll see if I can throw something together before I kick the bucket, haha.

I think carefully designing the campaign from the start to avoid a PR backlash would be really important. Doable, too.

I actually looked into it. They are smart on this and won’t sell to you.

Thanks for looking in to this! I wonder if we could put together a swarm of small transactions that would allow us to reconstruct a bigger data set of interest.

How do they determine who to sell to?

They have a sales person to talk to, and a whole process on who you are and how you will use it.

https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1220790758749270016?s=21

I really doubt legislation would come into effect. Instead, the people organizing the effort will be hunted down, prosecuted, and turned into examples of what happens when you try to fuck with people in high level government positions.

That's a coordinated response. We don't want to invoke a coordinated response. Pick some prominent people to make examples of--people who will make many others happy by their embarassment.

The whole matter would likely come to a head very quickly if said data were sent to politicians. Seeing their own data exposed would not only be embarrassing but a wakeup call to everyone.

Not only would the laws quickly change but also we'd soon learn about some of the nefarious antics and unsavory deals made by our governors.

That's the hope

Has happened with grindr a few times that I know of. https://accesswdun.com/article/2021/7/1024075

And the Strava on military bases thing. https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...