“It came from teleco companies” is not due diligence enough for me, and it shouldn’t be for you. That answer isn’t an answer and the lack of accountability is how the companies continue to violate our right to privacy and flourish.
Here's a sampling of others:
Mastercard sells information on your purchases.[^1] (Based on the info Oracle had on me, I suspect they might be one of the sources for Oracle Advertising.[^2])
Equifax, who gets information from your bank, your car insurance company, your cable company, and loads of other places, makes a nice profit off selling your info.[^3][^4]
ISPs know who you are, can infer a lot about you from unencrypted DNS queries and HTTPS SNI snooping, and they're happy to sell information about you.[^5]
Then there are several tiers of companies that buy information from various other companies, aggregate it, and then sell that off. A veritable snowball rolling down a hill of privacy violation.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/mastercard-data-mining-holiday...
[2]: https://datacloudoptout.oracle.com/request-your-data/verify-...
[3]: https://www.inc.com/associated-press/equifax-data-money.html
[4]: https://www.equifax.com/about-equifax/why-equifax/differenti...
[5]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/93b9nv/internet-service-prov...
It’s really infuriating to me that people say Google or Facebook are “selling their data” (they’re not, they hoard data and sell targeted ads) when Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T literally sell your live, personally identifiable, non-aggregated, location data to third parties, hiding behind their subscriber agreement legalese.
Just google it, more examples are easy to find.
I never claimed this. I replied to the question about how a telecom provider would have PII. My mobile provider knows my legal name and other details. They obviously know which tower is closest to my phone at all times or my phone would not work. That it is terrible of them to sell this data was not in question.
And I think our legislators show their ass in the case of the Tiktok hearing; effectively stating oh it's fine if the data is being bought and sold by a US company (Oracle).
The default of “you will be violated until we get to it, if we are able to comprehend it” is a dystopia I hadn’t imagined, yet here we are.
Tracking a user and selling that data should not be able to be slapped deep down in some TOS that grants intrusion into your life at that level. I wish laws would be changed to require explicit tracking requests for this type of data, that has to be conspicuous and separately authorized in addiction to any TOS.
I wonder if these are all shell companies to hide the “origin server” for this CDN of unauthorized surveillance data.
I’m also curious how many of these are just middle men that do nothing but markup and resell, vs how many of these companies do anything to enrich the data before flipping it.
Wouldn’t it be funny if someone were to use these systems to get the location information for the executives at all of these companies, and it ended up online everywhere? I wonder if they would change their opinions on technical loopholes allowing the tracking of people without consent