What Everybody Knows About You: Governments
This article is part of a continuing series about data collection today. I wanted in the previous articles to demonstrate how pervasive information intrusions are among all kinds of institutions, before turning in this article to governments, where most people focus their attention.
I’ll start this section with an anecdote dating back to the 1970s. Two friends of mine recorded their upcoming marriage at the Town Hall where they lived, a routine practice everyone undergoes in order to get their union legally recognized. Soon they started receiving solicitations from local department stores to open up wedding registries. The department stores could have learned about their engagement only from the town government. In other words, the local government was enhancing its revenues by exploiting and monetizing information its residents were legally required to furnish.
I talked earlier about the high-stakes snooping that governments do to uncover enemies, whether they be human rights activists or violent terrorists. But as the marriage story shows, governments also record a lot of mundane information about everyone in the course of their day-to-day operations. The story registry reminds us of the things we have to tell governments about ourselves. A partial list includes:
- Members of your household, with details about age, race, veteran status, and other characteristics
- School children, with details such as health screens and immunizations
- Land, residences and other structures, and major construction work
- Income and other information provided on tax forms
- Sexual offences
- Cars
- Guns
- Marriages
- Dogs and often cats
Other things that are recorded include:
- Health information related to government-sponsored health insurance programs
- Voting patterns, including political donations
- Military service
- Information on cars, pedestrians, etc. collected by cameras
In fact, the U.S. government knows enough about most taxpayers to calculate their taxes for them, as many countries do. The reason that hundreds of millions of Americans have to slog through filling out forms at this time of year is intense lobbying by the powerful tax-preparer industry.
For comprehensive lists of data collected by governments on ordinary residents and citizens, I recommend this article on Privacy.Net and this site at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Here is a brief list of some things governments record:
- Biographical information (names, addresses, birthdays, social security numbers)
- Biometric information (fingerprints, facial recognition images, DNA, iris scans)
- Immigration information (travel records, detailed files submitted by immigrants
- Law enforcement information (phone records, friendships and family relationships, forensic information, unsubstantiated accusations)
- Intelligence information (information gained by covert operations)
There are many concerns about how data is used to find and prosecute people the government doesn’t like.
Some of the information that governments collect becomes public. In the United States, the political party you voted for is public information, as are your political donations. This open data is valuable for transparency. But even if you call the police, in some jurisdictions, information about you becomes public knowledge.
One data collection project whose impact has been wildly exaggerated is China’s “social credit” program. Certainly, it centralizes the data collected from different sources about residents. But its main application is to businesses, where the government tries to prevent such offenses as food contamination.
I highly recommend an hour-long report on the social credit program released by human resources firm RemotePad. Although its viewpoint might be affected by the company’s location in Hong Kong, the video goes into great detail about what the program actually does and seems trustworthy.
The final article in this series discusses data collection by employers, and concludes with a general view of privacy today.
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