The Role of Permissions and Consent

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Legally, most apps operate under the framework of user consent—users “agree” to the terms and privacy policies. However, this consent is often meaningless:

Privacy policies are written in dense legalese, often over 10,000 words long.

Users are often given a binary choice: accept all or use nothing.

Permission prompts are misleading. For example, an app may say it needs location access “to improve user experience,” without disclosing that it’s selling that data.

This illusion of consent allows surveillance tech to operate legally while bypassing ethical scrutiny.

Data Brokers: The Middlemen of Surveillance
The real money isn’t always in the apps themselves—it’s in the vietnam phone number list resale of the data. Data brokers aggregate, repackage, and sell phone data harvested from multiple apps. They may sell to:

Marketers for hyper-targeted advertising

Insurance companies for pricing models

Political campaigns for voter targeting

Employers running background checks

Government agencies for surveillance

In the U.S., the data broker industry is largely unregulated. Some brokers maintain databases on millions of individuals, including sensitive personal information like race, income level, home address, and even children’s names.