The NSA's Bulk Collection Is Over, but Google and Facebook Are Still in the Data Business

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Don't be fooled: Congress may have finally passed the bill reining in the National Security Agency's bulk-surveillance programs, but your data is still being collected on the Internet. Lost in the debate over the NSA is the fact that companies like Google and Facebook continue to vacuum up vast troves of consumer data and use it for marketing. The private-sector tech companies that run the social networks and e-mail services Americans use every day are relatively opaque when it comes to their data-collection and retention policies, which are engineered not to preserve national security but to bolster the companies' bottom lines.

Critics say the consumer data that private companies collect can paint as detailed a picture of an individual as the metadata that got caught up in the NSA's dragnets. Companies like Google and Facebook comb through customers' usage statistics in order to precisely tailor marketing to their users, a valuable service that advertisers pay the companies dearly to access. "What both types of information collection show is that metadata -- data about data -- can in many cases be more revelatory than content," said Gabe Rottman, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. "You see that given the granularity with which private data collection can discern very intimate details about your life." And there's no guarantee what is collected by the private sector will stay with the private sector. "The government has a huge number of tools to get data from private companies," said Chris Calabrese, senior policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "That's obviously a very difficult situation for companies to be in."


The NSA's Bulk Collection Is Over, but Google and Facebook Are Still in the Data Business