> Personal data used by gangs and criminals. One example of what the public sale of data by companies like MrKoll can lead to is illustrated by a “Guardian” report about rival gangs using data brokers to learn the geographical location of their opponents to carry out attacks.
As I complained then, it gave no evidence that gangs used data brokers to get this information, only writing "Experts say criminals are being greatly helped by a 248-year-old law, forming part of Sweden’s constitution."
Who are those experts? Where is the evidence that the bombers used a data broker to find their target, or that removing this information from the public would have changed anything?
They don't need the data brokers. You can just call up the tax office on the phone and ask for someones address or person number. You get it, no questions asked.
The article is very confused about this. There are two separate issues:
1. the principle of free information ("freedom of information" in the US is super weak compared do Swedens much older laws)
2. Doing stuff with this data on a large scale and in bulk. This is where data brokers come in. This is also not needed for the gangs.
Employers. Not too long ago you could Google my name, the first result was MrKoll and an exclamationmark on my name.
You could then pay 10$ and get access to my legal history involving minor possession of drugs and DUI.
Now all my relatives know...
Yep this is pretty fucked, we also have our taxation calendar available for anyone to look up my declared income.
These systems and laws of openness worked great before the Internet, you'd have to call every court in the country to request access to my full legal history, and call the taxation office about my declared income. Now it's just 10$ away from anyone curious
No, unless it includes a credit score. These companies are shady and don't follow the law as intended. They would need your permission to store the data in the first place. Hence the journalism "workaround".
Proper background checks for criminality are done by the police, who hands the paper to the person the check is done on, and can only be done for roles for which the police are allowed to do those checks for. Like banking and teachers.
The idea here is that the workings of the public authorities should be open to scrutiny. Hence, all documents (correspondence, working documents, the lot!) are public, except those that are explicitly made secret, and it takes national-security level issues to do that. The authorities are not even allowed to ask who’s asking.
The first problem is that even material on individuals, collected by the authorities, becomes public.
This generally went unnoticed for a couple of hundred years, as you still had to know which documents there were, go around and ask whichever authority held the documents, and probably pay at cost for copies. Now we have the Internet, which has led to the second problem. Several data brokers have started to request all data there is, and then index, repackage, and sell it on the Internet, drastically lowering the threshold to request all the juicy stuff on anyone. Now, that is obviously against the GDPR, but the law allows anyone to become a journalist, who play by different rules, by saying "I am a journalist!" and paying a token fee.
So, to summarize: Openness, intended to keep tabs on those in power, and which has historically been somewhat tamed by practical barriers has, those barriers torn down by the Internet, become uncomfortably open.
Oh right, I get it. As an Italian we always spoke with admiration about this transparency regarding tax, but I always thought the request and the requesting party was also annotated and made available. What you describe is fairly blunt and alarming.
It certainly shouldn't. It's just public data, that anyone from any nation could both access and provide.
I don't mind these services and I think the recent development where they are blamed for enabling the violence is just a stupid distraction. The domestic terrorists we have would certainly still be a problem and would hardly stop their attacks if we got rid of our very useful public data laws.
The current politics are working hard on removing all the fundamental data laws of my country, beginning with making massive energy rebates confidential last spring.
Regarding electricity tax returns, not making the names public was a very good idea because of course some newspapers had headlines like "Look at how high tax returns some rich bastards got, it's a scandal, they could never use that much electricity just in their private homes!" the day after the anonymized sums of the tax returns were made public. Which just showed the ignorance of those journalists, because private taxes are much higher than corporate taxes so why would anyone want to pay privately for electricity used by a company? Nobody applied for tax returns, the sums were based on how much they had paid in electricity taxes. And companies got the tax returns too, just a few months later.
One of those who got high private tax returns came out publicly and explained that his company was of the type "enskild firma" which means that it uses his person number, it's not a limited company. And apparently Skatteverket had treated all companies of that type as if they were private citizens. But of course most people just remember headlines, so if the headline had been "Look at person XX, that rich bastard got this much in tax returns!" you had probably remembered that but not the later explanation that it was his company that got tax returns.
The idea with this temporary relief was to help home-owners keep their homes warm during the first winter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Many mechanisms could have worked for this purpose. A fixed amount for instance. Or an upper limit on a tax cut. Remember, the idea was to keep a typical home warm.
Instead there was a tax cut with no upper limit. So the affluent heating outdoor pools in the middle of winter also got relief, not just home-owners on the brink of ruin trying to heat their old house. In the big scheme of things, probably not a big deal, but interventions by the state should appear (and be) as fair as possible, lest people will loose faith in the system.
If the only idea was to help home-owners keep their homes warm then companies would not have gotten the same tax returns. This page lists the reason for the tax returns as "För att stödja elkunderna ekonomiskt och för att mildra effekterna av de höga elpriserna har EU infört en tillfällig möjlighet att använda de så kallade flaskhalsintäkterna för ekonomiska utbetalningar till elkunderna.". So general stimulation of the economy seems to also have been part of the reason for the tax returns.
I’m not sure anybody really wants them to exist (except themselves, obviously). Current law, more or less by accident, allows them to exist, and since this touches on the principle of openness in public administration, which is a bit of a holy cow here, any changes are unthinkable. My guess is that this situation will persist until slightly after it becomes completely unsustainable, at which point everyone will suddenly have been advocating for a change for the last decade.
I found this other article which mentions "Ransomware-as-a-Service Gangs" [1]. I think the meaning of the word is "group of people engaging in criminal behavior", not necessarily "a group of gansters", a.k.a "street criminals".
In addition to that, police uses data brokers information regularly, and there's plenty of evidence of it. Example from the first google search page: [2]. Whether or not you consider them to be "just another gang" is dependent on your personal opinions and how corrupt your local police force is.
The Guardian article was about a bombing of the relative of a gang leader, which also killed a woman living nearby. The implication was that public name->address lookup played an important role in that bombing, so should be curtailed in order to prevent similar future events.
My complaint is the article presented no evidence supporting that implication.
This linked-to page uses the Guardian article to support their position, but I don't think the Guardian article has any substance.
FWIW, Sweden is one of the countries which requires you to register your address with the government. The Swedish police already have the name->address information and don't need a data broker for it.
The Swedish government doesn't check that the registered address is correct, and if someone you don't know chooses to register at your address then you won't know about it, and even if you did there's no way for you to get rid of that registration. There has been cases of police breaking down doors and rushing in to apartments just because some criminal had registered himself on that address, even though the people who lived there had never heard of that person.
The Internet is not only bad — it is now possible to sign up for notifications when somebody registers at your address (it’s on the Skatteverket web, somewhere). However, Sweden being Sweden, I suppose you will still have to prove that they do not in fact live there to get rid of them...
Made me think of the opposite problem - in Spain you have to prove that the people who live in your house shouldn't, really. It can take years to evict squatters.
In the first one, you have someone registered at your house despite not living there. Getting notified about it doesn't solve it though. You still have to report it as a crime and then they will investigate before fixing it. Due to all the bombings, they implemented a speed track a few years ago when gang members are involved (so they don't blow up your house during the process) but I still believe it takes months to solve.
In your case, you have physical squatters. Then you need to take it to court and prove that they shouldn't have access to your house. It takes many months to sort out and they can claim that they have an agreement with you. This was major news in Sweden about 5-8 years ago when waves of EU beggars were making camps on people's land that cost a ton of money to clean up afterwards.
I don't know if this is going to help you answer your questions but here is some background information:
1. In Sweden you must be registered at an address for all purposes (taxes, health care, official communications, etc.).
2. On websites like MrKoll's, all you need is a phone number to find someone's home address (you can also find someone's phone number using their home address).
Based on these two facts, all the bomber planning the attack needs is a phone number to find out the address. If the victim is using a burner phone (which, by the way, have become illegal in Sweden since 2023, now all "kontantkort" or anonymous simcards can't be anonymous, they have to be registered to someone's name, and you can only do that with a valid ID), they can otherwise target one of their family members.
> Where is the evidence that the bombers used a data broker to find their target
The writing is on the wall. This is a free service. Why wouldn't they?
> removing this information from the public would have changed anything?
The problem is that these companies (like MrKoll there are others) are abusing the media license they have been granted, not only violating rights that have been well established in the EU (which Sweden is a part of) but also they are making an already vulnerable population even more vulnerable.
Grandmas and Granpas are being targeted by scammers with all sorts of schemes, and where do they get phone numbers and also a quick profile of the target? via these websites.
So yeah, removing this information from the public would change something, perhaps not necessarily to the gang wars, but for sure for the safety of the public in general (gang family members would be harder to find).
> > Where is the evidence that the bombers used a data broker to find their target
> The writing is on the wall. This is a free service. Why wouldn't they?
Did they use information at the library to learn how to build the bombs? That's a free service. Why wouldn't they?
Let's shut the libraries down too. Only people with enough money to buy books, and to pay for street informants, should be able to bomb other people. It'll cost you, what, $100 to have someone trail someone else home? There's no way a bomber could afford that.
Now with my tongue out of my cheek - if the bombers knew who to target because some of the gang members grew up on the same neighborhood so knew where the relatives lived, then making this information private wouldn't change a thing.
A site dedicated to strong privacy laws should use strong arguments to support its claims, not a mischaracterized third-hand (a Guardian writer describing Swedish news reports about police and neighbor statements) news report that may actually have nothing to do with the topic.
Didn't most countries have phone books where peoples names, phone numbers and some times address would be listed? And weren't those phone books usually quite complete? Were they opt in then so that phone book sales people asked you to list your number? (Swedish phonebooks were opt-out). Were you offered any kind of compensation then for allowing your number/address to be listed there?
Let me be clear. These websites list your full name, date of birth, main address (including the exact apartment number if you live in a flat), your flatmates if any, the size of your apartment, and the average salary in your neighbourhood. Comparing this to a phonebook entry is a bit of a stretch. Also, obviously, you only appeared in the phonebook if you had a landline.
Well, of course having everyone's address publicly available greatly helps everyone who wants to find out someone's address (for whatever purpose). I don't think you need experts (or evidence) to come to that conclusion...
I mean, this Swedish openness is nice (and I wish some parts, like salaries not being secret, were adopted elsewhere too), but your address being publicly available is an anachronism, like the phone books that used to contain everyone's phone number, and will eventually have to go.
Thing is, the linked-to noyb piece doesn't even characterize the Guardian article correctly. This piece says: "a “Guardian” report about rival gangs using data brokers to learn the geographical location of their opponents to carry out attacks".
The Guardian piece says "reports at the time said it could have been a neighbour related to a gang member."
That's the location of the relative of their opponents. And "could have" indicates uncertainty. Has the investigation since then determined why the bombing took place, and if a data broker or public data was at all relevant?
The Guardian piece only conjectures, yet noyb seems to think it's a solid foundation. This makes me distrust noyb's ability to support their position - making a mountain out of a molehill.
For that matter, how did the bombers know that gang leader had a relative, and that relative's name? Is one's family tree information also public in Sweden, or did the bombers know it from some other means? Like, did the gang members grow up together before joining different gangs, so knew each others' extended family?
In that case, public access to the data would be irrelevant.
Salaries aren't public I believe. You can see someone's taxable income. If you work one single full time job, the figure would probably be close to the total comp however. But for e.g. someone who works two half time jobs you can't see which employer paid what, only the taxable income (iirc).
I remember reading that Guardian report when it was linked here on HN, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39334413.
As I complained then, it gave no evidence that gangs used data brokers to get this information, only writing "Experts say criminals are being greatly helped by a 248-year-old law, forming part of Sweden’s constitution."
Who are those experts? Where is the evidence that the bombers used a data broker to find their target, or that removing this information from the public would have changed anything?