Big government already has a hundred ways of getting your SAT score, for example from the admissions department of any public university in the country. It's everyone else you should be worried about. A potential employer, landlord or bank pulling your teenage SAT score without your consent and judging you based on it is a scary but very real prospect.

"It's everyone else you should be worried about."

Sure, but also worry about the government. First, the government has no more business knowing your personal details than any other organization. If they want info, that's what warrants are for.

Second, people tend to thing of the government as some sort of single entity. It's not. Government is made up of people: some good, some evil, most just trying to get through the day. There have been numerous examples of the evil types abusing access to personal data, for a variety of personal (usually illegal) purposes.

We need privacy laws that apply to government and private sector alike. This is done elsewhere: the GDPR, for instance, applies (with some obvious exceptions) to law enforcement agencies.

Yes Big Gov does. And all those ways are 100% legal because it can buy the data on the legal market. There's a legal market for your personal info because...first and foremost it makes Big Gov's job 1000x easier *and* 100% legal. The point is simple. Big Gov has no interest in plugging this hole (i.e., protecting your privacy and personal info) because Big Gov is the Number 1 beneficiary of that hole.

The worry of everyone else is an off-shoot of Big Gov's needs, not the other way around. We can worry about the symptoms or we can worry about the root problem. I favor the latter.

What do you define "Big Gov" as for this discussion? Just federal, or also state, city, county...? (I'm assuming we're talking about the US, since the context of this discussion is the College Board)

What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data?

re: "What activities is government monitoring using commercially-available data? "

Exactly the point. We have no idea. No fucking clue.

And making that point gets down-voted? It's nice to know HN has so many Big Gov "influencers".