Tag: data collection

Palantir, Fractal And Your Personal Data Privacy – Get used to being used, because YOU are the product

Who controls the data the government collected from you for a generation?

Your insurance company collected data on your driving – so did your Lexus – who owns that data?

You told your doctor about controlled substances you used – and now it gets brought up in an interview.

If you can’t exclude someone from using your data, then you don’t control it. That means you really don’t own it. It’s that simple.

What does “own” mean here, let’s define the terms.

Owning the data means you can do anything you want with it – share it, sell it, mine it or build an A.I. language model with it.

From birth until the last Social Security check gets cashed, your data is collected by federal and state agencies, corporations and of course the internet.

Your teen daughter puts every waking moment on Facebook or Instagram – so who owns those hundreds of images?

TSA Pre Check, Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, government or military retirement, Tri-Care, veterans hospitals, and of course, the IRS – gather more data about every citizen than has ever been gathered in the history of mankind.

Each agency gathers different data, at different times, for slightly different purposes. And those purposes may change over time.

Who owns the rights to that data?

It’s a far stickier question than you think.

The knee jerk response is the government owns the data. They collected it for their purposes, so it’s theirs.

The government will certainly say so.

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Thailand – A Case Study for Biometric Data Control

Thailand has become a test case for the use of biometric data in every facet of life. Facial recognition data is required for any single transfer above 50,000 baht (around $1,580), daily transfers above 200,000 baht, and any international transfers from personal accounts.  All major Thai banks, such as Bangkok Bank, Kasikorn (KBank), SCB, Krungthai, and Krungsri, require customers to submit biometric data, and the Bank of Thailand (BOT) provides the general guidelines that these banks must follow.

It may begin with banking and documentation, but the ultimate goal is to develop digital IDs that are stored on a centralized database. The board of Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) proposed that users must submit biometric data to register SIM cards. The rule went into effect in August and applies to everyone in Thailand, including tourists.

The Thai Ministry of Public Health (MOPH), the Thai Red Cross Society, and the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) has implemented the use of biometric data to track undocumented persons. Health agencies claim the technology can identify the spread of disease and assist in providing humanitarian aid and medical services. The MOPH claims the technology is 99.75% accurate. According to the Department of Labour’s Bureau of Alien Workers Administration, over 1 million undocumented migrants were in the nation as of July 2025.

“The application of biometric technology not only improves healthcare, disease prevention and control, medical services, and humanitarian aid with accuracy and inclusivity, but also reflects the protection of human rights and dignity of undocumented people in Thailand. It also creates opportunities for education and research by Thai public health professionals to develop further benefits for the general population,” Health Minister Somsak Thepsuthin stated.

The Thai Red Cross Society is a branch of the global Red Cross agency. Thailand’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) claims all personal data will be securely protected, but they have already begun sharing with international agencies.

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Comprehensive data privacy laws go into effect in 8 more states this year

This year, comprehensive privacy laws are going into effect in eight states to regulate how businesses handle digital information and to give consumers more protections over their personal data.

The laws in Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Tennessee have taken effect already this year, according to a database from the International Association of Privacy Professionals’ Westin Research Center. Maryland’s privacy law, signed by Democratic Gov. Wes Moore last year, will go into effect Oct. 1.

Privacy laws enacted in Indiana, Kentucky and Rhode Island will go into effect next year.

Several other states are considering comprehensive privacy bills during this year’s legislative sessions. They include Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

When a person visits a website, applies to a job or logs into an online portal, they may be sharing their personal information. Comprehensive privacy laws can apply to a wide range of companies that participate in this kind of data collection.

These laws generally include two types of provisions — those related to consumer rights and those that establish business obligations, according to the association.

Under each of the new laws, consumers have the right to control when and how their data is collected and shared. Some of those provisions include the right to delete data from a company’s database, the ability to opt out of sharing sensitive information and the right to prohibit a company from selling their data.

The new measures also require businesses to ask consumers if they want to opt in to data collection. In some states, businesses are required to complete consumer data risk assessments and identify ways in which discrimination could take place. Some companies also may be required to limit to how consumer data is processed.

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Technocrat Sweep: US Health Officials, Tech Executives To Launch Data-Sharing Plan

Why would Technocrats care about your health data? When they see the public as a herd of cattle, they naturally move to “manage the herd.” RFK, Jr. earlier bragged that he wants all citizens to don wearable medical devices within four years, to collect mountains of data. This initiative is headed by AMY GLEASON, the Administrator of DOGE.

Amy Gleason worked at the predecessor of DOGE from 2018-2021 during the first Trump administration, where she played a key role on the White House Coronavirus Task Force’s data team managing critical pandemic data. She was named an Obama-era “Champion of Change” for her work in patient advocacy and precision medicine. She has emerged as a key Technocrat with her association with Elon Musk. Court records clearly show that Musk was never in charge of DOGE, but rather Amy Gleason.

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The Biden Admin Stole Your Data to Rig Elections and Censor Speech

Jason Chaffetz has delivered a devastating exposé that should terrify every American who values his or her constitutional rights. Writing in the New York Post, the former House Oversight Committee chairman pulls back the curtain on what may be the most comprehensive assault on American democracy we’ve witnessed in our lifetime—and it’s happening with our own tax dollars.

Chaffetz revealed that the Biden administration didn’t just weaponize federal agencies against political opponents; it orchestrated an elaborate data-theft operation that would make authoritarian regimes jealous. As Chaffetz explains, “Federal entities outsourced unlawful data collection to politically sympathetic partners. Rather than directly amassing data, they procured or exchanged it from or with nonprofits and technology firms.”

This isn’t some conspiracy theory cooked up by partisan critics. This is documented reality, backed by Freedom of Information Act requests and congressional testimony that the mainstream media has conveniently ignored.

The scope of this operation is breathtaking. Chaffetz exposes how the Small Business Administration—an agency supposedly focused on helping entrepreneurs—was transformed into a partisan voter registration machine. The SBA “proactively reached out to states, especially battleground states like Arizona and Georgia, to seek recognition as voter-registration organizations, despite federal law stipulating that states must initiate this process under the National Voter Registration Act.”

When SBA Associate Administrator Jennifer Kim was pressed during a 2024 hearing about whether the agency conducted events in non-Democrat-leaning regions, she couldn’t provide a straight answer. The evidence speaks for itself: “documented evidence of partisan bias in these efforts” reveals an administration that viewed federal resources as tools for electoral manipulation.

But voter manipulation was just the beginning. The Biden administration’s data dragnet extended into financial surveillance that targeted Americans based on their political beliefs. Christian nonprofits, gun manufacturers, conservative protesters—even members of the Trump family—found their accounts terminated without justification. As Chaffetz notes, “This initiative ultimately targeted Christian nonprofits, gun manufacturers, conservative demonstrators — even Melania and Barron Trump — shutting down their accounts without justification.”

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ICE Is Snooping on Your Medical Bills

The feds are vacuuming up a lot of data on Americans in the name of stopping illegal immigration. Their latest target? Your insurance data.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is now using data from the Insurance Services Office’s ClaimSearch, a private industry service for detecting car and health insurance fraud, according to ICE documents obtained by the tech news site 404 Media on Wednesday. ClaimSearch includes 1.8 billion insurance claims and 58 million medical bills—along with the personal data attached to them, including addresses, tax identification numbers, and license plates.

ClaimSearch’s public policy states that it grants full access to law enforcement agencies “investigating or prosecuting insurance-related crime, or developing background information about a specific individual or list of individuals who have been identified as persons of interest with regard to homeland security activity.”

Verisk, the company that runs ClaimSearch, denied to 404 Media that ICE or the Department of Homeland Security is one of its clients. But the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which controls access to ClaimSearch, did not directly answer whether ICE has access. 404 Media speculated that ICE could have gained access through another government agency.

In March 2025, the Trump administration signed an executive order to tear down “information silos” between federal agencies, and in May, the IRS signed a data-sharing agreement with ICE. The administration has leaned heavily on surveillance contractor Palantir, which has a contract with ICE to facilitate “complete target analysis of known populations.”

ICE has also been tapping into the nationwide network of license plate reading cameras by asking local law enforcement agencies to run searches for specific cars, 404 Media reported earlier this year. Some police departments insisted to 404 Media that the searches were conducted for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations branch, which handles organized crime and smuggling rather than immigration enforcement.

However, the ICE documents on ClaimSearch specifically said that the data was going to Enforcement and Removal Operations, the branch that handles the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants.

The immigration cops didn’t just start building their mass surveillance dragnets this year. In 2021, at the start of the Biden administration, The Washington Post reported that ICE was buying utility company records. While Customs and Border Protection (CBP) insisted in a 2018 report that it buys “only anonymized data” from third-party brokers, it has used commercial cell phone data to track and arrest specific people.

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Data Collection Can Be Effective and Legal

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Data Collection Can Be Effective and Legal

Introduction

It’s an Artificial Conundrum

It is not necessary to make an end-run around the U.S. Constitution to thwart terrorism and other crimes.

Those claiming otherwise have been far from candid – especially since June 2013, when Edward Snowden revealed gross violations of the Fourth Amendment by NSA’s bulk electronic collection. U.S. citizens have been widely misled into believing that their Constitutional right to privacy had to yield to a superseding need to combat terrorism.

The choice was presented as an Either-Or conundrum. In what follows, we will show that this is a false choice. Rather, the “choice” can be a Both-And. In sum, all that is needed is to place advanced technology that has been already demonstrated into the hands of officials not driven by lust for a cushy retirement.

Sophisticated collection and processing technology that also protects the right to privacy has been available for decades, enabling highly efficient and discriminating collection. Despite that, top officials have opted for quasi-legal, cumbersome, ineffective – and wildly expensive – technology that has done little more than line the pockets of contractors and “old-friend” retirees.

U.S. officials have been caught lying under oath – with impunity – with false claims about the effectiveness of the intrusive, high price-tag technology they procured and implemented.

In the Annex to this Memo we briefly portray the illustrative behavior of one such senior official. We do so in the belief that a short case study may shed light on the apparent motivation of many senior officials who seem to take far too lightly their oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States.

We took the same oath. It has no expiration date.

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Florida AG Subpoenas Medical Firms Over ‘Backdoor’ on China-Made Devices

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has subpoenaed two medical companies selling Chinese-made patient monitors over concerns that the devices could send patient data to China.

Uthmeier’s office stated in a press release that they had taken legal action against Contec Medical Systems, a China-based company known for making patient monitors, and Epsimed, a Miami-based company that resells Contec-made monitors under its own brand name.

The office alleged that Contec “concealed serious security problems” in its products, including a built-in “backdoor” that could “allow bad actors to manipulate data” on the devices without knowledge of either the patient or the provider, and programming that automatically sends patient information to an IP address that belongs to a university in China.

“Some of the most private, personal information” is going to China “without the consent, and in most cases, the awareness of the patient,” Uthmeier told The Epoch Times. “I think there’s a major consumer protection issue for Floridians, for Americans as a whole, and we’re not going to stand for it.”

Uthmeier’s office alleged that Contec and Epsimed may have violated a state law, the Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, in their assurances on product quality when the products appear to fall far short of standards given their security vulnerabilities. He threatened to pursue damages, civil penalties, and injunctive relief to protect consumers.

Contec Medical Systems is headquartered in Qinhuangdao, a port city located in northern China’s Hebei Province. It has an affiliate called Contec Medical Systems USA Inc. in Illinois to handle the U.S. market.

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One of NHS’s biggest AI projects is halted after fears it used health data of 57 MILLION people without proper permissions

NHS England has paused a ground-breaking AI project designed to predict an individual’s risk of health conditions after concerns were raised data from 57 million people was being used without the right permissions.

Foresight, which uses Meta‘s open-source AI model, Llama 2, was being tested by researchers at University College London and King’s College London as part of a national pilot scheme exploring how AI could be used to tailor healthcare plans for patients based on their medical history.

But the brakes were applied to the pioneering scheme after experts warned even anonymised records could contain enough information to identify individuals, The Observer reported.

A joint IT committee between the British Medical Association (BMA) and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) also said it they had not been made aware that data collected for research into Covid was now being used to train the AI model. 

The bodies have also accused the research consortium, led by Health Data Research UK, of failing to consult an advisory body of doctors before feeding the health data of tens of millions of patients into Foresight.

Both BMA and RGCP have asked NHS England to refer itself to the Information Commissioner over the matter.

Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of RGCP, said the issue was one of ‘fostering patient trust’ that their data was not being used ‘beyond what they’ve given permission for.’

She said: ‘As data controllers, GPs take the management of their patients’ medical data very seriously, and we want to be sure data isn’t being used beyond its scope, in this case to train an AI programme.

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OpenAI Is Ordered to Save Every ChatGPT Chat — Even the Ones You Delete

A federal court order requiring OpenAI to retain all ChatGPT conversations, including those users have deleted, should strong concern among privacy advocates and added pressure to a growing legal battle over the use of copyrighted material in AI systems.

On May 13, US Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang directed OpenAI to “preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going-forward basis until further order of the Court.” Although the order was issued several weeks ago, it only came to wider attention this week as OpenAI began taking formal steps to challenge it.

The ruling stems from multiple lawsuits filed by media organizations, including The New York Times, that accuse OpenAI of unlawfully using their copyrighted content to train and operate ChatGPT.

In response, OpenAI submitted a filing urging US District Judge Sidney H. Stein to overturn what it described as a “sweeping, unprecedented order.”

The company argued that the directive forces it to ignore user choices about data deletion, jeopardizing the privacy of millions. OpenAI also pointed to a statement from The New York Times editorial board asserting that Americans “should be able to control what happens to their personal data.”

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