Corporate Spy Tech and Inequality: 2023 Year in Review

Our personal data and the ways private companies harvest and monetize it plays an increasingly powerful role in modern life. Throughout 2023, corporations have continued to collect our personal data, sell it to governments, use it to reach inferences about us, and exacerbate existing structural inequalities across society. 

EFF is fighting back. Earlier this year, we filed comments with the U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration addressing the ways that corporate data surveillance practices cause discrimination against people of color, women, and other vulnerable groups. Thus, data privacy legislation is civil rights legislation. And we need it now.

In early October, a bad actor claimed they were selling stolen data from the genetic testing service, 23andMe. This initially included display name, birth year, sex, and some details about genetic ancestry results—of one million users of Ashkenazi Jewish descent and another 100,000 users of Chinese descent. By mid-October this expanded out to another four million accounts. It’s still unclear if the thieves deliberately targeted users based on race or religion. EFF provided guidance to users about how to protect their accounts. 

When it comes to corporate data surveillance, users’ incomes can alter their threat models. Lower-income people are often less able to avoid corporate harvesting of their data, as some lower-priced technologies This article has been indexed from Deeplinks