Every search you make, email you send, text message, voice chat, location, and most likely the conversations you have in your own home are monitored and stored in a database for whoever knows how long (probably forever). When I hear land of the free, I immediately think bullshit. We are slowly losing our freedoms, what can we do to prevent this? I mean, when Edward Snowden dropped the leaks, people protested, but barely anything changed. What can we do? This post not only applies to Americans, your own government in another country may possibly does the same thing. Feel free to comment!
Entire world, how do you feel about being stored in a database by US government agencies like the NSA?
Feels bad, man.
<laughs in massive data breaches> Better buckle up Buttercup, because “being in a database” is a reality. Thanks to data breaches such as Equifax, pretty much every US citizen and all their important details are available in numerous databases.
We willingly purchase devices that listen and watch our every move… to be added to private, corporate databases that get sold around like cheap prostitutes. At least with government databases, voting gives at least a teeny, tiny modicum of control.
And even better, while I cant name specific breaches in relation to global populations, it’s a safe bet most everyone else is compromised as well.
On the bright side, at least it makes random identity theft occurring to any one particular individual akin to winning the PowerBall.
If US finally gets its second civil war, its really easy to pick who goes in to the mass graves. You can just use an algorithm.
Same goes for the rest of the world. If ever occupied by Russia, you can be sure you’ll be “calling Zelenskyi” on a daily basis for every anti-Russian post you ever made.
I just wish they could fucking do it for my goddamned healthcare data. Switching states, practices, getting your full history of vaccines from a dusty file cabinet 24 years ago at a pediatric clinic…not a goddamned SQL table in sight. Wait days, fax everything, someone in the chain never makes the transfer, and you have to get it to your doctor and possibly multiple medical insurance agencies multiple times.
Oh, and literally everything running on different DBs at hospitals, when they use them. Even if it’s the same company running DBs for different hospital networks.
Same thing for moving states/addresses/voting/mail/licenses. No DBs. The only consolation is that apparently Canada is similarly fucked up and also doesn’t have a country-wide health DB, haha. So painful.
Our government has completely lost its way. The Founders would be both appalled and ashamed.
We do too.
We just call it outsourced labor and are happy about cheap clothes.
They also raped and tortured their slaves.
Please don’t pretend like people buying the only clothes they can afford is in any way comparable literally owning chattel slaves.
Can’t agree more. As a former member of the military, the state of affairs pretty sad to see.
Also, happy cake day :)
Every search you make, email you send, text message, voice chat, location, and most likely the conversations you have in your own home are monitored and stored in a database for whoever knows how long (probably forever).
This is most likely incidental.
As in, to successfully show text messages to people, somewhere at the ISP, someone has to have a database that shows what messages were sent off from which tower and need to be routed where. Maybe they’re retained for a while for re-send reasons, too. Yeah.
But the point is, that’s not the same reason why your home address is retained at the motor license department.
We humans love to see patterns in things, but we do so even when none exist, as our brains want to desperately simplify information to save space, essentially. But we should not let that fool us into thinking the world is simpler than it actually is: We have a host of reasons to retain data, and this existed long, long, loooong before digital databases. And for good reason. After all, if it cannot be verified that you are you in context X, the state can hardly offer you service Y or protection Z (such as those are in the US in particular, granted).
Your city has to know who you are and where you live. Your motor dep needs to know which license belongs to whom and is attached to which vehicle. Amazon needs to know where to send your parcels. Your phone provider needs to know which phone belongs to which number in their network and where it is right now. Etc, etc, etc. They all do so for individual reasons.
