On a similar theme, I was reading this morning how millions of taxpayer money was being paid to rape crisis centres that were ultimately owned by private equity companies.
Take it from me, the priority of venture capitalists is not to provide public benefits. It’s to maximise their dividends and the returns on their investments.
In my view public money given over for this sort of service should only go to charities so that, once the overheads are covered, 100% of the money is spent on the intended purpose. Not diverted into the very ample pockets of already very rich people.
i made the claim a few years ago that data might be the next big global crisis, from the energy required to manage it, to its lack of security, and its ultimate use in currency and monetary systems, as well as how and by who it is used. One example I dug up was a bus / coach service that had a database of passengers, entry in to the database was a requirement for travel based on an erroneous use of anti-terrorism laws. The bus company was in financial difficulty, was bought by some sort of equity firm, who saw value in the sale of the data, which quickly became the core business, the actual travel was a secondary concern. with data harvesting and amalgamation they were building very detailed profiles, which is not unusual. The problem for them arose when they were found to be selling the data to the national police and police were using that data to target people who were going on marches or protests. Stopping them from getting to destinations or visiting travellers en-mass at home, school or work.
Not sure about the charity thing you bring up, but definitely non profit and with things like the NHS and medical data its onward distribution should be restricted, if not stopped altogether.
On a similar note the the criminal records check that many have to undergo for work, the database might be open to as many as 3 in 5 people even more when third and fourth party users came into play, when i was writing the article about this, those companies that did checks had no effective responsibility to maintain the records securely and one estimate made by the report authors was that there were around 4 million data breaches every year, and, of the several million record checks done every year only about 1 in 200 of them were appropriate to the job application, an additional point that the report stated was that around a third of all the data was erroneous. which opens opportunity to all kinds of businesses to manage your data, all of whom are doing data scraping scraping themselves.
Its a bigger problem than most people think, and its profitised by the kind of companies that have no public regard, and with government data there is a big trough for these tory and (Labour when in power) donors to get their fat noses into.