FBI Turns To Private Sector for Data

MSNBC is running a nice piece about a private company that aggregates data about you and sells it to the government. Things like this are why I just don't understand the typical Libertarian babble that government data collection is bad, but corporations should be allowed to collect and sell whatever data they want. Hey, guess what: if a corporation can collect and sell your information, it's available to the government too. Ten billion records! That's more than 30 lines of data - each line could have dozens of pieces of information - about every man, woman and child in the United States. The mind boggles.

Um, no.

Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money. They have no interest in advancing political agendas or using that information to harm people. They use data to benefit people - through focused marketing. With information, they can give us the products we want.

Um. When you say, "Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money", you're right; although I wouldn't really consider this either innocent or noble, but nonetheless, their goal is to make money. However, you then go on to say that they have our (our being consumers, etc.) interests in mind.

They don't. Not at all. Their goal is to make money. Period. Not to make products. Not to benefit the consumer. To get the consumer to give them as much money as they can, while doing as little as possible in return (because the more you do, the less profit you make). This is how business works today.

You can further see this by looking at all the silly patents and lawsuits that come up; these corporations have figured out that they don't even need to make anything to get money, they can just sue the pants off anyone who has an idea they've claimed. It's pretty sickening.

The information collected by corporations is simply to find where they can make the most money, not, as you assert, to "give us the products we want". If you were right, the RIAA would be donating music and money to napster for us all.

(This is not to say that some people in some corporations have more noble goals. It's just to say that this is not the corporate goal.)

Now the government is rather the opposite situation. Their goal is not to make money. It is to govern the people. Unfortunately, you have the opposite problem you had with corporations; the government as a whole might have a (somewhat) noble goal, but you get individuals and groups who struggle for more and more power.

Now claims of privatizing everything, without any thought as to the current state of the system, and what implications there would be for moving to a privatized system, and indeed what implications at all a privatized system would have, are just silly. (CA, power, deregulation.) Now, to put policing power in the hands of a corporation (whose goal is to do nothing but make money) just smacks of abuse.

You miss the point, as well. The government is owned by people, too. (Unless you think it is owned by aliens or something.) Just a lot more people. Each one of us. Corporations abuse us just as badly, just in different ways and for different goals.

"That is all we need to know" sounds like brainwashing or stubborn blindness to reality, too, if you ask me.

Re:I see no problem with it really.

Because they would just hire the Pinkertons, who would show up and kill the rioters.

See early 1900s history, unions, and Buffalo for more on that one.

Re:I see no problem with it really.

As a libertarian I have some disagreements with my fellow Libertarians.

Firstly, there is nothing wrong with corporations collecting data about people. Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money. They have no interest in advancing political agendas or using that information to harm people. They use data to benefit people - through focused marketing. With information, they can give us the products we want.

Not all corporations are evil. Not all corporations are good. I support the free market, but not every action of every corporation. I am most concerned with corporations that try to use the power of government to achieve their aim of making money. Examples being the RIAA and the MPAA.

n short, we should live in a society of limited government. If the functions that government presently executes, such as defense of the realm and policing the streets, were carried out by private corporations at the behest of out citizens, everything would be much fairer. Look at the rioting in Cincinati. If policing were private, that would not have happened.

Individuals decide to riot, not cities. A private police force does not guarantee that people will not riot. There really is no guarantee that others will choose to behave in a peaceful and non-violent manner. As a Libertarian I recognize that life is full of risk and believe that I have a fundamental right to defend myself against violent individuals. Thus no government should take away my right to own firearms, hire security guards, or install an alarm system in my home or business.

Data being available publicvally is good, as long as it is not abused. Corporations have a record of non-abuse, and are owned by the people. The government does not and is not. That is all we need to know.

Again this is too general. Many individual corporations have a history of non-abuse. However, other individual corporations do not. Remember that corporations are only a legal entity. They are owned, controlled, and operated by individual human beings. Some of these human beings see nothing wrong with using the force of government to achieve their end. They have no problem lobbying for regulations to hurt competitors or rules that invade the privacy of consumers.

Remember that the government does not want privacy or anonymity. No government wants that. The government wants to be able to track everything you do. Think about all of the regulations that the government imposes on you and how they stop you from protecting your privacy. Any and all non-cash (i.e. anything that isn't a cashier's check, money order, traveler's cheque, or currency) financial transactions require the use of your social security number (or taxpayer ID) so that the government can make sure people are paying their income tax. You can't rent an apartment without proving that you have the legal right to live in the US. This allows the government to know where you live and keep immigrants out of the country.

In short, I am not afraid of all corporations. Only those that conspire with the government.
Stuart Eichert

The government created the superkey

Indexing people is not as easy as it seems. How many "John Smiths" are there? Even which live at 200 Elm Street? How do you know if this John Smith is the one that lived at Elm street 10 years ago?

Well, it is all easy if every person could just be tagged with a number that they must -- under pain of jail time -- use in every substantial transaction.

The number exists. It is your SSN. And who created that?

So here is the reason that privacy is always a greater issue between the State and citizen, and between citizens or groups of citizens (including corps): the State can use force. Citizens can't. Isn't that distinction quite clear?

A large part of our current problem with privacy is the fact that even in our dealing with private entities, we are still required to use SSN. And that makes them perfectly able to index all significant facts on us. Furthermore, it opens the door to use of the SSN by others asking trusting-but-foolish consumers, to index all of their own information with that of the larger players.

Without a superkey, none of that would be possible. Naturally there would be tried to invent superkeys, by the Doubleclicks of the world. But people would instantly see the intent and avoid such things.

Re:I see no problem with it really.

Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money.

I can't believe that you type this with a straight face. There is nothing innocent and noble about pursuing profit above all else.

Corporations destroy our environment, abuse workers (what do you think minimum wage would be if there were no unions? We only need to look to where your Nikes were made for the answer)

Corporations are about expoitation. Suck as much cash out of the consumer as possible, lie to the consumer as much as you can possibly get away with, only regard the health and safety of employees and consumers when mandated by law. (How safe were cars before government regulations?)

If you want a prime example of why libertarianism is doomed to fail, you only need to look as far as the Tobacco industry, which lied to consumers for decades, before finally being forced to come clean and admit that cigarettes were both addictive and harmful. (Standard Libertarian answer would be that its a person's choice to smoke, but I would argue that most people begin smoking when they are young, before they are fully capable of understanding the consequenses of their actions, and nicotine, being a more addictive substance than heroin, is manipulated to make it very difficult for people to quit.)

The reality is that Libertarianism only works if Corporations are 100% honest with consumers, and consumers are 100% informed. Neither is ever true. It is rarely in a corporation's best interest to be honest with consumers. Whole marketing departments are devoted to getting people to turn off thier brains.

Libertarianism is flawed, because it makes some very flawed assumptions, and aim for a kind of Utopian society that we can never achieve.

(Just my opinion... flame away)

Don't mod me up, Reply with something intelligent instead

Re:Information collection is not always bad

YOU ARE BORING. You are mere bytes in a database somewhere and the only interesting aspect of your existence is the question of where to store the backup tapes.

YES!

Orson Scott Card called this 'the significance problem' in his book Pastwatch. You've summed it up perfectly, the problem with privacy is that many people are so arrogant that they believe they matter. They think they have some clever ideas no one else has thought of. That they are important enough that Time/Warner or the government (choose your poison) is going to give a rip about them. That they are something more than just another one in six billion.

After working with large scale databases for a while it becomes very clear that privacy doesn't matter much. The Man isn't out to get you (and if he were, he sure as hell wouldn't be using a 250 million person database of lung cancer data to find you). You don't matter to anyone you haven't already met. Get over it.

--

We can all sleep better now.

I find this excerpt from the linked article to be interesting: Although ChoicePoint says it has records on nearly every American with a credit card, it doesn't always provide access to that data. The company's Autotrack service is popular with many agencies and businesses and is also used by reporters at The Wall Street Journal. But entering the name of FBI Director Louis Freeh into the Autotrack database produces an error message. A company spokesman says ChoicePoint intentionally blocks Mr. Freeh's records as an act of good corporate citizenship.

Translation of the last line: "A company spokesman says that the publicly held firm, ChoicePoint, is not so stupid as to endanger its stockholder's investments by providing information on the man heading one of ChoicePoint's biggest client organizations." Apparently this comment by the ChoicePoint drone is intended to make us all feel better, as if we all hobnob with politically heavyweights of Freeh's standing.

Re:Information collection is not always bad

Here's a scenario. It's the late 1950s and all of your biochemist friends are raving about this new chemical that has been going around. You call up a supply house and order some. Your package of LSD arrives the next week and you use it. Two years later, it's illegal and people who are known to have used it are considered "dangerous" and an "employment risk".

Do you think that, today, companies would not be searching credit card records for such purchases?

Also, as a criteria for employment at most financial companies (anyone bound by the SEC, basically) you have to be bonded. This means that an insurance company does a background check and decides how likely they are to lose money on you.

Do you think that your milk purchases are innocent? You do know that people who buy "too much" milk just happen to be insurance risks, right? Oh, probably not for any reason that would affect you, but Prudental doesn't know that, you see. They're just doing actuarial math, and you lose.

Now, let's think about what this information will lead to in the hands of the FBI... profiling based on... let's say, type of reading material? Software choices (people who buy Red Hat are national security risks, FreeBSD users are terrrorists and BeOS users are drug smugglers, right), it just goes on and on. How many years do you think it will be before the FBI can issue a search warrant based on a 99% corolation with a criminal profile? If you said, "that would never happen," then in the words of the West Wing, I want you to write down the exact date and time that you said that....

Bastards!

How can anyone work for these evil, evil companies?

"What did you do at work, sweetie?"

"Invaded the privacy of millions!" [Sparkling grin]

"Wow, that's swell. Pass the potatoes..."

How? It must take an army of underpaid monkeys to do this evil thing. Government employees I can see, but these are normal people not looking for an agenda.

Truly mind-boggling.

-grendel drago

Re:Libertarian babble?

The difference between corporate and governmental data collecting can be summed up as:

1) Lie to a corporation, and you don't get a free keychain.

2) Lie to the government, and you go to jail.

Is that clear enough?
--

Saw a story about this the other day...

They were talking about Amtrack getting 10% of the haul from successful DEA busts in return for which Amtrack would give the DEA information on customers who used cash to buy one-way tickets as well as "suspecious" credit card purchases.

The nice thing about getting information from a private company is they don't have any nasty concerns about due process or constitutional rights. As a customer you pretty much surrender all that stuff if you want to deal with them. I would, however, question the constitutionality of an enforcement agency being able to use information provided under such a deal. IANAL, but I'd be interested to know if the Supreme Court has dealt with this sort of issue in the past and what their decision was in any such cases.

Re:I see no problem with it really.

You're kind of a rare bright egg, aren't you?

Corporations aren't interested in advancing political agendas? RIAA? DCMA?

Governments are only interested in control? Own a house? That's right, the gov made it possible for you to have a mortgage, and not pay exorbitant fees to the corporation actually lending you the money.

You want to farm out government functions to corporations only interested in making money? Hey, that's great. Hold out your arm, we'll put your barcode on. Careful in front of the telescreens.

Privatize police? How much do you spend on a murder? How much will you pay for peace of mind?
Where's the profit?

Re:I see no problem with it really.

The reason the cops use guns? Permanent subjugation.

And, of course, no private company interested in maximizing profits would ever kill somebody for a silly motive like saving the cost of a trial and imprisonment. We know that the legal system is perfect, and poor people would always be able to afford lawyers who would be guaranteed to win them big judgments against large corporations and force them to care about people's saftey.

Give me a damn break. Corporations as a group have given ample evidence that they don't give a damn about people, only money, and if it turns out that it's cheaper to hire good lawyers and have the cops shoot people to save on imprisonment costs then that's exactly what they'll do. They already do things like deciding that it's cheaper to kill people with things like pollution and accidents and settle the lawsuits than to clean up their act. Why believe that shooting criminals will be treated any differently, particularly when it's so easy to put a gun in the hand of the guy you've just shot to make it look like it was justified?

Re:Information collection is not always bad

The problem isn't really with record keeping, per se, but with record aggregation. It's just fine for your oil change guy to send you a message that your oil needs changing, or for grocery store to track purchases so they know what things you might want to buy. The problem comes when they start selling that information and some large database winds up containing everything about your daily activities. When somebody can see absolutely everything about you, they can start taking apparently innocent pieces of data and start compiling things that might hurt you.

What happens, for instance, if your bank decides that they want to do a hyper-thorough check on you before giving you a loan? They might decide not to give you a mortgage despite a perfect record of making payments on time because you don't change your oil often enough and they think that you won't take good care of your house. Or what happens when nobody wants to sell you health insurance because you buy too much ice cream? Even worse, what happens if they make those decisions in error because their records are slightly imperfect- you change your own oil sometimes but the shop you get your oil and filters from doesn't track those things, or you actually feed most of that ice cream to your dog, who loves it?

Face it -- to the rest of the world, the big evil government, and the big evil corporations, YOU ARE BORING.

You're boring until you want to do business with them. Then you become interesting, and they want to know everything about you that they can. And, as has been shown quite clearly by various problems with credit card companies and the like, erroneous data can get into the system and cause people no end of problems because it doesn't get flushed. Of course, businesses and governments aren't the only potential consumers of information. Do you really want all of your personal information to be available to private citizens who have grudges against you? How about somebody who's stalking you? It happens already, and it's a nightmare when it does. Adding more information to the pot will only make it get worse.

Libertarian babble?

I'm a Libertarian (card carrying) and I don't see how this is a problem. It is only a problem that the government has the data, I could care less if a corporation has it. If they do, its my own damn fault. If the government has it, then its as good as permanent. But I try very hard to keep my personal information out of corporate hands. I don't use my health insurance for anything but dire emergencies, pay cash for as much as possible, and am very careful to opt-out of everything I have been put on. Sure, once you're on a list, you're probably there for life, but what bad is it doing? I have to admit, almost every list I am on I was put there because I allowed it. How many people read the fine print when they put their names down? Like that 10% savings at the grocery store when you use your frequent shopper's card? Ever think where that data goes? I don't even have a card, but I always ask the person behind me in line for theirs, and they always give it to me. Big corporations aren't the scare, its the government that's the scare. And the government bought this list because we allowed them to. End high taxes, and I think you'll end government programs that are allowed to purchase this information. Opt-out of all you can, and stop putting your real name on the dotted line just to save 5% or get something for nothing. My magazine subscriptions don't come in my real name either :)

Re:Libertarian answers

Except that someone has to do the work, and if it's not the governement it's the corporations. What "work" are you referring to that has to be done?

Between two evils, I'd rather pick the lesser one.

Between the corporate world and the governement, that would be corporations. Disney and Microsoft can't force me to use their products. They exist only by our consent, and the day we all stop buying their stuff is the day they go away. With government, you don't get the choice of not being a customer.

P.J. O'Rourke (my favorite libertarian writer) once offered the "dead grandmother" litmus as a method of determining whether a government program should go forward. It went like this:

Government pays for programs with taxes, which they collect from everybody, including your sweet old grandma.

If you don't pay your taxes, you are fined; don't pay the fine, and you are jailed; break out of jail, you can be shot.

Therefore, everything the government does is accomplished by putting a gun to your grandma's head and forcing her to pay for it.

Using that logic, whenever considering whether to support a government program, you should ask yourself, "would I be willing to shoot my grandmother over this?"

The military? Yes. "Sorry grandma, but we are all in the same boat if those Canadians start storming over the border. Pony up like the rest of us!"

The BATF? No. "A bunch of redneck cultists have almost as many guns per capita as the average Texan... we need to roll in the tanks and firebomb them, grandma."

The National Endowment for the Arts. Hell no. "Pay up for the Maplethorpe exibit, or it's curtains for you, Grandma!"

As for corporations, as long as they stay within the law, and are not using the power of the gun against me (which the government is), they can be as greedy and corrupt as they like.

With corporations, the CEO is only choosen by stockholders and doesn't care about pleasing anyone else.

As it should be. Nobody else owns the company, so why should anybody else have a say in who they are trying to please?

Re:Libertarian babble?

Doctor paiten confidentality is not granted by the constitution.

Nor should it be.

Your right to an education is not guarenteed by the constitution.

Not by the US Constitution, no. Educating your children is not a responsibility of the federal government. There are clauses in the constitutions of many states which guarantee the right to an education, but that is up to the citizens of each state to decide for themselves.

The constitution does not give you the right to be descriminated upon, on the basis on race, religion or sex.

Did you word that the way you mean to? Are there many people clamoring to be "descriminated upon, on the basis on race, religion or sex."... In any case, descrimination by the government based on race, religion, or sex is unconstitutional, but the constitution does not (and should not) grant government the power to interfere in the right of free association... menaing that if I want to spend all my time around black hindu women, and don't allow anybody else in my Country Club, it is my right to do so. I would be a bigot and an asshole, but there's no law against being a bigot and as asshole, nor should there be.

The government does have the right to tax your income based on Section 6 of the Constitution, "All Bills for raising Revenue " It does not say or limit how this revenue is to be obtained. Also from Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes." for things including "and general Welfare of the United States" That happens to include it's citizens.

The key word here is "general welfare of the United States"... meaning programs that benifit everybody (like social security) are constitutional, but programs that only benifit a few people (like a farm subsidy for ADM Corporation, or national funding for AFDC) are not.

The rest of what you said, I agree with. I especially liked your opening comment that rights not explicitly spelled out are not neccesarrilly denied. There are some people (myself among them) that believe that the Constitution was not meant to spell out our rights, but to spell out the few cases in which the government has power over those rights. Had we held fast to this dogma, the Bill Of Rights would have been redundant: The government could not , for example, restrict free speech or gun rights because the constitution never granted them the power to do so.

Pragmatic people recognized that this concept might not be held as sacred as it should, so the Bill of Rights was written as a safe-guard, although several of the "founding fathers" saw that it had the potential to diminish our rights, because people might start to think, as some people today think, that Americans do not have rights beyond those itemized.

Re:Libertarian babble?

First you say...

If they do, its my own damn fault. If the government has it, then its as good as permanent

Then you say...

Sure, once you're on a list, you're probably there for life, but what bad is it doing?

Ok, so as long as it's permanent, what difference does it make who has the list? Corps hold great sway over your life already. I'd say greater than governments.

Want a good example ? Credit. With a bad credit report, you can be denied employment, housing, and education. This kind of oppression comes not from the government. They rarely even use it in the normal course of business. It comes from Corps. Did you vote for this ? (hint: noone did - the capitalist market created it)

The problem here is that once the corp gets it, they can sell it to whom ever they like. Including the government, and others you oppose. And you have no say in what they do, unless you are on the board.

There is no FOIA for corps, and no right of the public to know what they do. On the other hand, there is such a check against the government. At least in an idealogical sense, they have to pretend to care about what I want.

Toodles,
Nephs

Re:I see no problem with it really.

Ok, let's play the "pretend this guy isn't really a troll" game.

Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money.

There are two things wrong with this. Let's unpack some assumptions, shall we?

1. Corporations do not have 'aims'. Corporations, legal fictions notwithstanding, are not people- they are the tools of people. Specifically, corporations are a legal shield from liability for the actions of the capital of the people who control the company, as well as the control of the capital others invest in the company (making it functionally theirs).
2. To the extent that we can imagine corporations to have aims, they are not noble. Corporations want to make money, but the desire to make money is not noble in itself- in fact, the desire of the individuals who make a living by making themselves dependent on these corporations often find that their personal ethics are in conflict with the "noble" moneymaking aim of the corporation, so they engage in activity that they would never engage in for their own sake for fear of losing their jobs. Ask any salesperson, any pr person.

They have no interest in advancing political agendas or using that information to harm people.

I'll agree with this statement, except to the extent that corporations *do* have an interest in politics and hurting people when their bottom line is in some way affected by it. Which is pretty much all of the time. See the debate over campaign financing, see the DMCA, see the Sonny Bono copyright extensions, EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions, paint company defenses of the safety of lead paint back when Gale Norton was a lobbyist for them, etc, etc.

in short, we should live in a society of limited government. If the functions that government presently executes, such as defense of the realm and policing the streets, were carried out by private corporations at the behest of out citizens, everything would be much fairer. Look at the rioting in Cincinati. If policing were private, that would not have happened.

1. How do you figure? I'd say your assertion could use some support.
2. Do you suppose that if the government contracts out prisons, that putting more people in prison will be profitable? Is making a profit still noble then? Will the invisible hand of the economy find an ideal economic point between the supply of prison labor and the demand of the few consumers outside of prison? Is this better than our 'unlimited government?'
3. If the most cost-effective way to maintain order is to strip citizens of their rights and kill the troublemakers, do you suppose that the nobility of the profit motive will make it ok for corporations to protect their profits? What could be more noble than making an honest buck and keeping the cycle of consumerism going so that the only thing that makes our society work is capital?

Just wondering,
Bryguy

no No NO!!

Troll, you have your head in the sand.

Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money.

The aim may be innocent but the pursuit typically is not. A corporation is an entity with a single purpose - increase profits. Since a corporation does not have a conscience, does not have a set of morals and cannot experience remorse or guilt, it is free to use whatever means are necessary to acquire profits. It is easier to dump toxic waste products than to clean and process them properly. It is easier allow consumers to be harmed or die as a result of a defective product than to issue recalls. The only accountability they have is under the law.

They have no interest in advancing political agendas or using that information to harm people.

Nonsense. They advance any agenda that will maximize their profits. They favor any ideology that advocates less governmental regulations.

And they certainly do harm people and more largely, our whole culture. In order for companies to sell their products they must convince you that you need their product. Marketing in this day and age has become particularly insidious. Rather than convincing a consumer that their product is superior to others they prey on the insecurities of the public. They convince people that they are not cool, not sexy, not valuable without their product. They convince women that they are fat, ugly and worthless unless men desire them. They convince children that they will not be cool or liked if they do not own/consume their product. They exploit sex to sell Doritos and hair shampoo. They exploit families to sell unhealthy meals of fat-saturated hamburgers and fries cooked in vats of grease. They exploit individuality to sell you something to be different, because hey, everyone is being different. They exploit treasured classical music to sell airline tickets. They exploit inspiring speeches that have changed the social conscience of our country to sell telecommunications services. Credit card companies exploit naive incomeless college students with $10,000 credit limits so they can "establish good credit". And you're trying to tell me they are not advancing any agendas?

OPEN - YOUR - EYES

-------

Information collection is not always bad

*sigh*

My garage keeps a record of every oil change, tire rotation, and filter change I've had with them. When I go too long without regular maintenance, a computer program automatically sends me a letter to tell me it's time to come in.

"Oh, horrors! But your maintenance history is private. It's no body else's business what kind of oil you have in you."

Bleah. This is the 21st century. Life is much more complex. Each of us has literally hundreds of important dates and events to keep track of. Sure, I could stick a reminder note in my Palm, but why use up the memory when Quik Lube is so willing to use their own?

I like those little reminder notes. I don't mind sacrificing a little privacy if it keeps me from throwing a rod on I-10 during rush hour.

"But," you say, "there's a big difference between oil changes and some big evil corporation knowing what milk I buy!"

*snicker* See how stupid that sounds?

Sure, they have your personal information. What keeps it from being evil is the simple fact that most personal information is incredibly mundane and useless to anyone but me, just like my oil changes.

Face it -- to the rest of the world, the big evil government, and the big evil corporations, YOU ARE BORING. You are mere bytes in a database somewhere and the only interesting aspect of your existence is the question of where to store the backup tapes.

Re:i'm gonna get flamed for this one...

The problem is that governments - ours (that is, the U.S. gov't) too - have a nasty habit of not going after criminals exclusively, but of going after political dissenters, subversives, agitators from racial, gender, and economic underclasses, religious minorities, and lots of other people exercising their consciences.

That is why the Fourth Amendment exists, and why your ignorant and blithely submissive attitude about the government spying on anyone and everyone brings us that much closer to living in a place where dissent and nonconformism are punished for their own sake.

OK,
- B
--

I see no problem with it really.

I know that the author of this piece is clearly biased against the libertarian party, but as an active member of it myself let me set him straight on a few things.

Firstly, there is nothing wrong with corporations collecting data about people. Corporations have an innocent and noble aim, to make money. They have no interest in advancing political agendas or using that information to harm people. They use data to benefit people - through focused marketing. With information, they can give us the products we want.

Secodndly, the government is completely different from this. It exists to advance a political agenda and control every detail of our lives. It has a moral outloook, and if your morals are different you are screwed.

In short, we should live in a society of limited government. If the functions that government presently executes, such as defense of the realm and policing the streets, were carried out by private corporations at the behest of out citizens, everything would be much fairer. Look at the rioting in Cincinati. If policing were private, that would not have happened.

Data being available publicvally is good, as long as it is not abused. Corporations have a record of non-abuse, and are owned by the people. The government does not and is not. That is all we need to know.