Well, now we know it's not just the corporatocracy – the vehicle manufacturers, the insurance mafia, etc. – that's mining your data. It is also the FBI. "The FBI is buying up information that can be used to track people's movement and location history," according to Politico, which quoted FBI Director Kash Patel as follows:

"We do purchase commercially available information that's consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and it has led to some valuable intelligence for us," Patel said during testimony before Congress last week.

Italics added.

"Commercially available" sounds innocuous – like commercially available stuff you might pick up at the Dollar Store. It's the available part that's not-so-innocuous. It is not "available" in the sense that the owner of something puts it out there for people who might be interested in buying it. Like a For Sale sign taped to a car's windshield by its owner, to indicate he's wanting to sell his property. What Patel is talking about is the property – your data – that is being taken from your vehicle and sold to other parties (such as marketing firms that want to know more about you so as to be able to fine-tune their pushy selling to you, as well as the insurance mafia, so they can more effectively mulct you) without your consent or even knowledge.

There is a an important difference there.

You buy a new vehicle and you think – reasonably – that you are now the owner of the vehicle. For this word to have any substance, it must be the case that no other person or party can obtain data collected by your vehicle without your explicit prior authorization. Even people who rent apartments have a legal right to privacy; i.e., the landlord cannot just enter the renter's apartment any time he wants to and filch through his tenant's desk drawers or have a look at his tenant's computer's history. Were he to do that, it would e considered a crime.

More finely, if he were caught doing that, it would be considered a crime.

Well, it is common knowledge the vehicle manufacturers mine – and sell – data collected without people's explicit consent and now it's been revealed they provide this data to the federal government's primary law enforcement agency. They have been caught, in other words. Yet no one has been charged, much less arrested.

Again.

Isn't this astounding? Isn't it a measure of the extent to which the people of this country have been beaten down, psychologically? A quarter century has passed since Nahhhhhhhhhnlevven and the subsequent conditioning of Americans to accept living in a panopticon that encompasses everything, just about – including their vehicles.