The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered.
Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they’ve sided with the tech lobby over and over again.
Their inaction is deadly.
By Evan Greer
For the LOVE OF FUCKING GOD, give us a FUCKING NATIONAL REGISTRY to halt data broker abuse!
Shit like this is gonna happen when data brokers collect and ALL of your personal info WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT.
There should be a national registry that PROHIBITS data brokers from collecting our personal info.
We already have a National Do Not Call Registry that makes it so we cannot receive calls from robocallers and telemarketers, and there should be an opt-out system that makes it so data brokers CANNOT under ANY circumstances collect any info about us that can reveal our real identities. This is already a system that everyone in California is gonna get by 2026. That is NOT good enough! Expand it to the ENTIRETY of the United States and make it so everyone can opt-out!
This is gonna continue unless data broker abuse is stopped. https://www.donotdox.com/
if one good thing can come from these senseless murders, let it be this. these services should not be allowed to operate without strict regulation.
The only ways you can opt-out of a data broker in the here and now is to manually go to each data broker yourself and opt-out there, or pay money for a removal service that automatically removes your info and opts you out. That is not okay at all. We should have a clear and concise way to opt-out our personal, sensitive info from data brokers, and the best way for that is to give us a national registry like we already have with the National Do Not Call Registry that prevents telemarketers and robocallers from calling us. Everyone in California is already gonna get this by 2026 with a bill that makes it easier to delete online personal data, which is known as the Delete Act. This is not good enough! We need a national registry that prohibits data brokers from collecting our info outright, under any circumstances. If there’s one good thing that should come out of these murders, it should be this. These services harvest our data and then sell it to anyone willing to pay, which should outright be made 100% illegal. These services should not be allowed to operate, and quite frankly, I’d like to see a few owners of some of these data broker companies in actual jail for the shit they’ve done to innocent people, such as been the cause of this recent shooting. Fuck all of them.
I don’t give a shit if the owners weren’t directly involved with the shootings. It’s THEIR data broker company, and so, they are equally responsible for the murders of those people. Just because they didn’t actually kill anyone doesn’t mean they can’t still be charged. It is THEIR website, THEIR company. The owners of all of these companies that were used in the Minnesota shooting should ALL, quite frankly, be arrested and face numerous charges for indirect murder. They weren’t actually involved with the murders, but they should still be treated the same way as actual criminals should be: charges, fines, and a long prison sentence.