This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 26, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Government data collection about Americans is troubling, but the data about us that is routinely

collected by the private sector confers a great deal of power to those who might make use of

information contained in data leaks.

Charles Fain Lehman, author of a new essay at libertarianism.org,

argues that big data leaks drive the democratization of disciplinary power.

We spoke about the implications earlier this month.

I read your essay at libertarianism.org and I thought it was interesting, but if you look at just

the headline and just the graphic, you would think, oh, he's talking about the National Security Agency or the FBI

or other agencies of government that routinely collect and at certain points might make use of data that they've collected on us,

but of course that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about the entirety of the private sector that routinely collects and aggregates data about anyone in the world,

particularly our consumer habits and our browsing habits and that sort of thing.

So walk me through just the broad strokes of what the general thrust is.

So I think this piece began with I think one disturbing insight which is I know people

many people have fallen on everybody will remember the leaking of data held by Equifax, which is a credit rating firm, I think late last year.

And part of what happened with the Equifax hack is that something like half of all Americans

social security numbers associated to their names were leaked to, were stolen.

And what that means in practice is that the Social Security

number, which is essentially your unique identifier,

is no longer a valid form of identifying you as yourself. Half of all Americans we can

no longer trust that the Social Security numbers are meaningful. And these kinds of

hacks happen all the time. And what I think we need to take away from that is the insight that there's a scale of data available about us now today.

...