https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillance-data-brokers-congress-anthropic
Plus the recent news, Trump names Nvidia, Meta CEOs to science and tech council and last year DOGE got access to millions of government records. It could benefit Musk’s companies for decades.
Realistically, for US citizens is there any possibility of recovering from any of this? I see people asking for more regulation. Regulation is good moving forward but hasn’t the damage already been done?
With the current US administration (including arguably the most corrupt supreme court in the country’s history) what’s the likelihood any of this will improve for US citizens?
As someone who worked on big data tools, used across virtually every industry from pharmaceutical to surveillance, historic data has value, but the most prized possession is realtime data (where milliseconds matter). The technical distinction to accomplish capturing and processing large amounts of new data created two fundamentally different architectures, batch and stream processing. Streaming services is 20% of the entire pie of the big data analytics market which is significant when you consider they do almost everything exactly the se except streaming can simply analyze large amounts of data coming in right now (to the millisecond). Almost all companies using streaming analytics also pay for a batch analytics tool as well.
I say all that to stress how valuable this minute’s data is over the last minute, this hour’s data over the last hour, days, months and so forth. As soon as new data stops from your own actions or regulations, your old data quickly decreases in value.
Further, look at any report of you on these data markets and you’re likely to see a bunch of old outdated addresses mixed with new ones. There’s all sorts of data quality issues that have manifested and even me sharing the same name as my dad, has gone a long way in screwing up all these reports and making the old data untrustworthy. I’m even mixed up with a small town mma fighter lol. In other words, it’s about as trustworthy as expecting an LLM not to hallucinate.
Once we have regulations around surveillance capitalism I think we will be comforted in knowing just how little the industry cared about data quality and only cared about quantity and speed. What is most important is that none of that information should be considered useful in determining a credit score, previous residency, medical history, political leanings, infidelity, or a trustworthy source to determine criminal offenses. Proper regulation should deem this material illegal for use in court and culture will scough at the use of those data for use of unconsenting surveillance data.
There is hope and a light at the end of this dark period of the early information age.
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