Thread by @doctorow

When people call the US Supreme Court "corporate-friendly," it's often hard to know what that means in concrete terms. But here's an example of what it means when the highest court in the land is in the tank for big business.

1/

Transunion is a giant credit reporting bureau. These companies have their origin in a company called "Retail Credit" (now Equifax). RC paid people to spy on their neighbors and kept secret files on who was a "race mixer," a homosexual, or a political radical.

2/

These files were sold to employers, financial institutions and landlords to help them discriminate against people for their political, sexual or racial views.

jacobinmag.com/2017/09/equifa…

3/

Today, these companies continue to maintain massive, nonconsensual, wildly inaccurate databases detailing your finances, your employment, your living arrangements, your run-ins with the criminal justice system and more.

4/

These are sold - again, without your consent - to lenders, employers, landlords, and other entities, who use them to make decisions that affect where you live and work, whether you can adopt, and more.

5/

These companies have been in the news continuously for half a decade, thanks to a series of high-profile, unimaginably massive breaches that compromised the security of virtually every adult in the US and millions abroad.

pluralistic.net/2021/04/30/dox…

6/

Transunion's secret files on you include a tickbox for "suspected terrorist." Transunion wrongly accused 8,000 people of being terrorists. It discovered its error and violated its statutory duty to inform the people it had wronged.

7/

The Supremes just ruled that those wronged people aren't allowed to sue Transunion for accusing them of being terrorists and making that judgment available to its customers, including government agencies, employers and landlords.

eff.org/deeplinks/2021…

8/

Specifically, the court said that only the 1,800 people whose wrongful accusation was transmitted to third parties could sue Transunion. It likened the untransmitted accusations to "a letter in a drawer that is never sent."

9/

Writing for the majority, Kavanaugh failed to grapple with the collection, analysis and use of private data, which - per @EFF's Cindy Cohn - is "an opaque archipelago of databases are linked and used to build and deploy machine learning systems that judge and limit us."

10/

As Cohn points out, Kavanaugh explicitly ignored Congress's intention in passing the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which followed from the ghastly scandals that prompted Retail Credit to hide under its new "Equifax" name.

11/

The whole point of the act is to allow the public to seek justice when credit reporting bureaux are reckless in their dossier-compiling.

12/

Transunion was reckless: "it marked people as potential terrorists simply because they shared the same name as people on a terrorist watch list without checking middle names, birthdays, addresses, or other information that TransUnion itself undoubtedly already had."

13/

This decision is a boon to any company seeking to block litigation over privacy breaches, who will cite it in a bid to force the people they victimize to prove not just that the company leaked their data, but also that someone hurt them using that leak.

14/

This is the standard that Google and Facebook cynically advocated in their amicus briefs, and while the court explicitly recognized that privacy breaches can create "intangible harms," that doesn't mean that corporate lawyers won't try to stretch this ruling.

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/06/29/thr…