On this week’s episode,Last Week TonighthostJohn Olivermade two huge power moves. First, during the initial segment, he flipped off his previous “Business Daddy,” the American multinational AT&T. Secondly, at the end of the show about data brokers and privacy infringements the comedian essentially blackmailed members of Congress.
After Oliver talked about the horrors continuing in Ukraine, he moved on to discussing conservative One American News, also known as OAN, and the fact that it was recently dropped by AT&T-owned DirectTV. This leads Oliver to merrily announce that “as of Friday, AT&T no longer owns us” and raising two middle fingers towards the screen adds “which is frankly two more bars than you have ever had.” Therefore, after this episode, we can probably expect the “Business Daddy” running joke to end.
This episode’s main segment concerned a topic that most of us are familiar with — the feeling that our computers and smartphones are monitoring us and sometimes taking our information without our awareness. Everyone has received ads that specifically target their interests and, as Oliver explains, the people who are responsible for this are data brokers. These kinds of companies “collect consumers’ personal information and resell or share that information with others” with little to no laws to mediate its use.
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The biggest problem with data brokers, as Oliver points out, is that they often end up collecting more information about us than we are comfortable with and using it for purposes that we are not even aware of. These companies compartmentalize people’s data and put them in distinct groups, helping marketers sell their products more effectively. What can happen is that these lists can separate people by certain personal characteristics like ailments and illnesses and anyone can acquire this information for a price.
This process of acquiring and selling data is not prohibited under HIPAA compliance requirements unlike what some people might think. No matter what we do, no one can be completely anonymous online. For some, this might not be concerning in the slightest, but for others, like domestic violence victims, this exchange of information could be fatal.
The lack of regulations is also beneficial to the government and political campaigns, hence why not much has been done to enforce laws that would protect people’s privacy online. TheLast Week Tonightteam knows that this should not be acceptable, so they went out of their way to effectively prove that anyone can buy data belonging to anyone else and force politicians to care about this issue. At the end of the episode, Oliver reveals that he and his team executed their own data-harvesting experiment on Congress members in Washington D.C. and that it yielded surprising results.
“If you’re thinking, ‘How on Earth is any of this legal?’ I totally agree with you. It shouldn’t be,” the host says in his conclusion to the episode “And if you happen to be a legislator who is feeling a little nervous right now about whether your information is in this envelope, and if you’re terrified about what I might do with it, you might want to channel that worry into making sure that I can’t do anything.”
For the sake of everyone’s privacy, we better hope politicians took this elaborate scheme to direct their attention to this issue seriously. you may watch the segment down below.
