 This is probably one of the biggest loopholes in the Bill of Rights right now and this loophole probably exists in other countries too where you're supposed to have protection against warrantless spying. Normally if the police want to tap your phone or search through your house or search your mail they have to first suspect you of a serious crime usually some kind of felony and then get a judge to sign a warrant to let them go through your stuff or they have to get a subpoena to be able to get your records from the phone company or the internet company or whoever and this is the checks and balances of power that you may have heard about in civics class and for most of this country's history it worked at least on paper to prevent the police from doing warrantless searches of your person your house your mail your horse and buggy even if you've got one of those modern horse and buggies with a whole lot of horsepower but back when these rights were being written down we didn't have big tech and more importantly we didn't have data brokers who have made search warrants wiretapping subpoenaing the phone company and other forms of law enforcement spying all but obsolete for a lot of their cases so to get the full picture of this we got to start with social media sites aka the data collection portals so most of these sites are free as in beer they don't cost you any money but they are absolutely not libre their tech stacks are not free and open source and we can't even necessarily know exactly how much data is being collected by social media companies because almost all of their software and their stack or at the very least the end user applications are black boxes the software just does what it does and you're stuck with it now companies like facebook and google they have thousands of servers running in dozens of data centers all over the world with state of the art air conditioning to prevent these machines from melting down under the load of three billion people posting pictures of their cats and three billion other people searching for pictures and videos of cats this uses up millions of megawatt hours of electricity not kilowatt hours but millions of megawatt hours each year so it begs the question of how can they afford to keep the lights on and let people use these web applications for free well these applications are free because you are the product billions of people are using things like facebook x snapchat google documenting their day-to-day activities this is supposed to be the whole point of social media right share what you did today with the world or at the very least with your friends after all there are privacy settings on apps like facebook that let you control who can see what you post right well sure maybe other people aren't able to see certain things that you post but all of this data still remains within facebook they have access to it and they keep this data long after you've deleted a post from your wall or even after you've deleted your entire facebook account user data tends to stick around on these servers for quite some time long after you've deleted your timeline and you're no longer using the application and i'm just using facebook as an example here but the same is true for pretty much every social media app search engine every other big tech creation so the zuck knows everything that you've ever put out on facebook instagram and his other social media properties but he knows much more than that you see every single time you visit any kind of website the owner of that site is able to see your ip address your user agent and of course they can track what pages you visit within the website what buttons are clicking on the website and so on even if you're using vpns that are so popular these days to hide your real ip your user agent string is probably still unique enough to track you across the web and these are just the data points that can be collected by a static site the vast majority of websites and web apps these days are going to use javascript to make their sites dynamic and to make them look more modern the sexy single page application design that users and developers have become so fond of isn't even possible without some kind of javascript being used javascript has its legitimate uses but when it's enabled the owners of these sites can track you much closer the modern internet seems pretty spooky when most sites want to execute client side code on your computer that the site owner might use to track you or potentially even do something more malicious but the reality of the situation is so much worse you see most developers don't even really bother developing their own tracking software for their sites they just go ahead and use someone else's typically facebook or google's to get analytical data about how people are using their web apps and this data is actually really useful for developers and online business people to improve their applications like if someone is spending too much time on a particular page clicking on the wrong buttons to say add an item to their cart on an e-commerce site that might be an indication that that button is in a bad spot or just the ui design is bad and some improvements need to be made on that particular page or maybe the web app overall but the problem is even if the people that are using your application are not on facebook or they don't use google products you using their tracking pixels is still sending that data back to them so those companies are still able to fingerprint and track people across every other web page out there that is using their trackers so this is how these companies are able to really track you across the internet even if you aren't a direct consumer of their products or their services now each of these tracking companies like amazon facebook google etc they use the data that they collect from you to improve their own products and to increase their own profitability and then they'll also sell that data that they've collected from their users to data brokers who turn the spookiness of this online tracking up to 11 you see amazon collects a lot of data on you through their tracking pixels and of course if you shop on amazon then they're going to have a lot of information about your shopping habits such as how much money you're spending each month what kind of products you like to buy so on and so forth but they might not know what kind of media you consume like if you're not obviously buying dvds and blu rays on amazon if you don't use audible twitch or prime video or any other amazon media property then they might not know what you like to watch amazon wouldn't know about your youtube watch history for example because that data is owned by google well you see the data brokers are buying data from many different companies they might have bought your data from amazon and bought your data from google they're also buying data from your credit card companies your isps rental agencies pretty much anytime you write your information on a form there's a good chance that a copy of that form is going to make its way back to whichever data broker bid the most on it the data brokers then combine these different data points into a detailed portfolio about you that they sell for a premium to customers like insurers credit bureaus and of course military and law enforcement they are one of the top customers of data brokers because it lets them skip the whole process of getting warrants and just spend some taxpayer money which they have plenty of access to on an entire data set for a suspect the police get an easy route to spy on you and these public big tech companies get to say hey guys we don't actually sell your data to the police we just sell it to data brokers which everybody is doing and what they do with it from there isn't our business so they get to look good in the public eye it's a win-win situation for both the police and big tech well right now there is pending legislation to close this digital loophole called the fourth amendment is not for sale act which will require law enforcement to get court orders to compel data brokers to disclose data and this also cuts off the option for them to buy this data with taxpayer money which is one of the most messed up parts of this in my opinion our money is being used to buy our data against our will this bill could finally close one of the biggest loopholes in the bill of rights that we have in the digital age contact your local representative and tell them to support it and of course continue to practice good opsec by using apps and services that will provide you with the best online privacy and not add to the data points that these data brokers are ultimately collecting and selling like and share to hack the algorithm follow me on odyssey and have a great day