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Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

What threats do you imagine this poses? I'm not particularly concerned with immigration legal or otherwise, but a census of who lives in the US and whereabouts they are is pretty fundamental to having a functioning government. The creators of the US seemed to think so as it's one of the functions they outlined in the constitution.

What's interesting is that the article doesn't know how the government obtained the data in question. I don't know either, but I wonder, did they buy it from a private broker like anyone else could?

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the article doesn't know how the government obtained the data in question

The Heritage Foundation is not an arm of the government, and I'm not sure why you though the government was involved in the collection of this data. The original report (linked within TFA) doesn't specify its methodology in any meaningful way, but it's well known that data brokers resell anonymized device location data and it seems rational to presume that it was purchased commercially.

Indeed, I got them confused with the US government for some reason.

Generally I agree that the issue here is apolitical, that, whomever might want to abuse the ability to buy up/acquire data, whatever tbe villains of the day- there should be checks against this creeping authoritarianism/survelliance-by-the-very-wealthy. Selling consumer data is too alluring & unimpeded.

But it is the least shocking thing I've heard that the Heritage Foundation is behind this effort, & astoundingly unsurprising this very-longstanding forefront-of-conservatism would be confused with the U.S.G.

The article does mention the government is involved in location tracking.

Under ATD, the federal government assigns “SMARTLink” devices to track the location of migrants after they are released from federal custody.

It may even be possible to request this data with a FOIA request.

A census "By whom?", "By what means?", and "For what?", all seem relevant concerns in a general sense. No specific accusation necessary.

Having a census of residents who pay taxes and vote locally, which is required for a functional government, is quite different from real-time (or even delayed) location data from personal devices.

What if the government doesn't want to be functional?

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/2020-census-u...

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