Musk isn't the biggest privacy threat

“People are scrambling” to figure out if Elon Musk’s programmers have accessed their private information, explained a federal intelligence employee to HuffPost. About a week earlier, a Forbes headline read “Elon Musk And DOGE’s Access To Student Loan Data Raises Concern.” That same day a CNN headline read “Homeland Security Secretary Noem says DOGE team has access to agency data.” A week later an NBC headline read “Top Social Security official steps down after disagreement with DOGE over sensitive data.” These news reports referenced a few of the federal government computer systems that billionaire Elon Musk and his team accessed, at the behest of President Donald Trump, under the auspices of making the government more efficient. In defending the project, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said of Musk on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “What he’s finding with his algorithms, crawling through the data of the Social Security system, is enormous amounts of fraud, waste, and abuse.” While much of the media attention focused on lauding Musk from the right and chiding him from the left, there was a dearth of discourse about how ubiquitous data collection, not Musk or his team, is the biggest threat to people’s privacy.

The modern digital economy thrives on the destruction of privacy. Many of the technologies we rely on today— from GPS to the internet to touchscreens — were originally funded by the U.S. government for wartime surveillance and communication. In the post-Cold War era, these innovations were commercialized, leading to the rise of Silicon Valley. However, it was the aftermath of September 11, 2001 (9/11) that solidified the partnership between Big Tech and the government. Under the guise of national security, the federal government responded to the attacks of 9/11 with new laws that enabled mass data collection. As a result, Big Tech companies gained enormous power by supplying data to intelligence agencies. The result was a surveillance capitalist economy, where user data became the most valuable commodity.

As data collection expanded, private industries recognized its immense value. Insurers, landlords, advertisers, police departments, social safety net providers, and even educational institutions sought access to user information to refine their models and maximize profits. The internet’s so-called “free services” were merely a front for mass surveillance. Everything from driving in a car to checking into a hotel to making reservations at a restaurant to vacuums and televisions with so-called smart technology collect behavioral data, often without clear user consent. This obsession with data fueled predictive analytics allows tech companies to anticipate and manipulate consumer behavior.