IRS and Data Aggregators plus more on this Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast

Craig discusses how the IRS gets around collecting data on US Citizens.  They buy the information from these private Data Aggregators like our friends at Equifax - who by the way collect tons of information on you without your permission (you have no say in what information they collect) and then sell it!

For more tech tips, news, and updates, visit - CraigPeterson.com

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Craig Peterson (2): [00:00:00] Coming up in this hour, we're going to talk about the IRS. Yes. Investigated for using location data without a warrant. We're going to talk about us airports and the company that clears you going through that little test that they have at the very beginning.

Hi everybody. Craig Peterson here. Yeah. If you've ever had a run-in with our friends at Homeland security with blue shirts, transportation security, many people have decided to do something that.

I haven't done and I don't know what I would do. I think it's kind of dangerous and we'll explain why here in just a couple of minutes.  Of course, at my website at craigpeterson.com, make sure you're on my email list. So you get all of my newsletters and all of that great information that comes with them. And right now, if you sign up, we are including some bootstrap stuff, getting your cybersecurity for your home altogether, as well as for small businesses.

So all of that. Craig peterson.com/subscribe.

We were talking in the last hour a lot about taking your computer to a computer repair shop and what to do. Well, how about you shouldn't do and how Hunter Biden apparently got himself into a whole lot of trouble by this little eighty dollar repair that apparently needed to be done to his Mac computer. Yeah. Not so much fun.

 We're going to start out this hour by talking about the I R S. Yes, the internal revenue service, right. We have a system here in the United States. It's different than most socialist countries, certainly different than the fascist and communist countries of old, where you got your check from the government and that was your paycheck.

 There's no withholdings or anything because of course everything is free and you get money to spend as long as you've cut those little ration coupons in order to spend it. Even then, right, the stuff's not on the shelves. The joys of socialism.

Here in the United States, we don't have capitalism in its purest form. There are a lot of limits on what can be done and what should be done. The federal government bets a lot of your money on technologies that never pan out. We could give up hundreds of millions, actually, billions of dollars worth of wasted tax money that went to various friends of various government officials, frankly, when you start tracking down the money, it's very, very frustrating to me and I'm sure to many of you out there.

So we have something called the Internal Revenue Service here in the United States. Its job is to collect the revenue, the taxes from the people. We voluntarily disclose all of the money that we make. We are paying taxes with withholdings. If we have, I have a regular salary income, right?

That W2 income and the in the cases of some of the other ways we make money, we're supposed to disclose it, right? Like I do some farming. So I had this little form that gets filled out along with my taxes. Cause I got chickens and bees that I raise and. It's just a really complicated system and it frustrates me to no end how complicated it is.

That's because we've got our wonderful legislators and rule-makers just constantly changing everything, right? It's kind of crazy.

Well, one of the things the IRS has been concerned about is I think a very concerning thing, frankly, and it should be concerning for all of us. This is also part of our cybersecurity control number 16 here, which is account monitoring and control. What the IRS has done, they said, Hey, listen, we got to find these people who are out there who are using these electronic devices and are potentially not paying taxes that are due.

Again, this is something I warned about years ago, not just because it's part of control 16, but because. It's just inevitable, right? The government wants to get its hands on all of the data it possibly can.

It's like marketing firms, right? As a marketer, you want to know your customer and you want to give them the right message at the right time. What good is it to have an ad for a Ford truck when you're never, ever going to buy a truck? It doesn't do you any good? It doesn't do the advertiser any good.

So how does the government do this and what did the IRS do? We've got a couple of Senators right now, Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren, who is now demanding a formal investigation into, how the IRS used location data that they got from a third party.

We've known for a long time that the Federal Government is not allowed to collect data on US persons. What does that mean? Bottom line, they're not supposed to be out there and looking at what we're doing. I think that kind of makes sense because we're supposed to have privacy. We're supposed to be secure, right? In our papers, our documents, it is part of the Constitution, which is being ignored more and more, nowadays. But anyway, so they're not supposed to be coming after our data. So they go to data aggregators. Data aggregators and I had some on my show years ago when it was first in my mind becoming a real problem. It might've been even a decade ago now, but these are companies that buy data. Some of the data is a matter of public record and you would be surprised I'm sure to find out all of the public records that are out there on you. Some of the data is private that they buy from some of these agencies that track your credit. They give you a credit score. Some of it is a property that you own. It's the state secretary of state's office. That has all of the liens filed under that uniform commercial code. So UCC one filings, all of these things. They get pushed to put together and take driver's information - driver's license information, car registration, and now they have a picture of you.

 One of the things that they've added to this recently, and this wasn't true way back when I was first interviewing these guys, is the information from your cell phone. Now you might say, well,  I have my location tracking turned off on my cell phone. So what are they doing? Have you played a free game lately?

To do know what a free game actually costs too, because some of these games that you download, some of the software that you put onto your mobile devices are tracking you in some places sometimes you know about it.  These Fitbit watches, for instance, remember a few years ago, there was a big controversy because military members were wearing Fitbit and we're going out and running in the morning and tracking their runs and having competitions with each other, which is a wonderful thing.  Then we found that it was being tracked and put onto a public website. So you could see all the Fitbit users all over the world. And you could zoom in on military bases, including apparently secret military bases where people were running around in this big oval, that was about the size you might expect from a landing strip.

So this information can be used and can be misused. Frankly, there was a real big thing too. A few years ago, they found some monitors down in Central Park in New York, and then some of the other parks, and they listened for the broadcast that comes from smartphones.

Smartphones, for instance, are they're out there trying to find wifi networks.  What you can do is you can send out a wifi network ID and then talk to a phone and apparently what was going on is some bad guys were using them to track women who are jogging through central park and potentially attack those women. Again, information that you're not really thinking about, that's being leaked.

So what's happened now is the IRS and other federal agencies and state and local agencies have done this as well. The IRS apparently went to one of these data aggregators and they wanted to find where certain people were, where their homes were. So how do you do that? How the IRS wants to find phones, they want to know where you live. All you have to do is figure out where does this phone spends the night, because the phone is at your home at night, typically, right? It's turned on in case the kids need to reach you.

This week we got a phone call at like four 30 in the morning. One of our daughters was in pain on the floor in the bathroom and it was a phenomenal thing. So we don't turn off the phone. It's great having that and it was great that you could call us from her bathroom, right?

That could never have happened before, but it happened now. Her phone was at her house at night. Ours is our house at night. it is common, certainly not just talking to these cell towers. Right.

But apps that are on them could potentially be targeting us, keeping our data, keeping our information.

So when we come back, I want to talk a little bit more about this.

 Because two things I want to talk about that haven't been done to help protect our information, but I also want to tie this back to the IRS again.

 How far should the federal government be able to go to track people who have no criminal convictions, no history? They're just regular ordinary citizens that are out there.

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson. Stick around. Cause we'll be right back.

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