3

Your Boss Might Order You To Rob Your Own Place Of Employment

When a car company wants to crash-test a car, they crash it. When an airplane company wants to test the durability of a jet engine, they try to break it. When a bank wants to test security ...

Yeah, you guessed it.

In 2016, an employee of the Greensboro, NC branch of BB&T was opening up when a masked man approached, pointed a gun at him, and generally went through all the motions of an extremely efficient robbery. The employee tried to alert the police with the handheld alarm device he was carrying, but to his growing horror, no one responded. This incident turned out to be a robbery drill designed for another branch of the bank. The robber was a teller from that bank, and the cops were in on the joke. The employee hadn't been informed for the sake of authenticity.

Later that same year, two sisters aged six and 11 had their day thoroughly ruined when they were shopping in a H&M in Dublin. A man training the staff had chosen that day to stage a fake robbery, and the pair ended up hiding in a changing room with their mother, fearing for their lives as the fake robber screamed threats and demands.

2

You Could Help People Kill Themselves In Switzerland

At the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, they deal in private assisted suicide, guaranteeing that you die with dignity, and ... that's it. As long as a Dignitas customer has a suitable reason to die and a sufficient amount of money in their wallet, Dignitas doesn't give a good goddamn about anything else.

How do they get away with it? The explanation is stated on the clinic's own webpage: According to the Swiss Constitution, "Anyone who helps someone to commit suicide, providing they are not acting out of selfish motives, cannot be punished."

The key term there is "selfish motives," and the site has that covered. "Selfish motives" would be, for example, if through assisting in a suicide, someone could inherit assets earlier or would get rid of a financial obligation of support. Yet the fact that someone receives a normal financial compensation for assistance with suicide cannot fulfill that definition.

Dignitas' spin on "dignified death" takes time, and there are procedures to follow. First, you need to sign up as a member on their website, which will cost you around $210. This and an annual $85 membership fee will keep you on the list until it's time to call it quits, at which point you send a letter clarifying why you can't take this shit anymore, complete with medical records to prove it (cost:$2,430). After that, you come to Switzerland to pay for two meet-ups with doctors ($810). Finally, another $2,430 allows you into the death ceremony, which isn't exactly a posh affair: The Dignitas clinic is just another plain old building, where you go to pick an "apartment" ...

Bristol Museum

1

You Could Collect Massive Amounts Of Information On People And Then Sell It To The Highest Bidder

You know your online data is being sold, but that, by necessity, means someone is actively selling it. We don't stop to consider that part. They're called data brokers, and data is what they ... broke. Everything they can get a hold of, from your online activities and traceable financial transactions to phone records, government information, and even medical files. Sometimes they just straight-up buy it from companies you've been dealing with. Sometimes they're less straightforward: Before the internet, they sneakily went through peoples' magazine subscriptions and public records, quietly ticking boxes. "What kind of car do they drive? How many pet tarantulas do they have? Would they notice if we fed them one when they're asleep?"

As technology marched on, the categories they put us into became far more specific. The largest broker, Acxiom, boasts "Over 3,000 propensities for nearly every U.S. consumer." And that's just the one company. It's fair to assume that pretty much everyone's out there in some data broker's files, neatly arranged in folders by any metric you can think of. Data Broker company MEDbase 200 retails freaking lists of rape victims, at 7.9 cents per name.

Way back in 2007, a data broker company named infoUSA peddled huge lists of elderly people, ranging from "Opportunity seekers" to "Suffering seniors" (people dealing with serious illnesses) to "Oldies but goodies" (gamblers over 55). The names should've clued you in that these lists did not have the best intentions. They were specifically designed for telemarketers and fraudsters. One flat-out said: "These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change."

If you suddenly get a discount coupon from a diaper company, that's because a data broker sold your diaper fetish. Or maybe you have a baby. We're not here to judge. If that ad for Viagra seemed to arrive a little too conveniently, well ...

MEDbase 200

In 2011, a subsidiary of data broker / credit monitoring giant Experian unwittingly sold the personal information of an estimated 200 million Americans -- Social Security numbers and all -- to a Vietnamese man, who then resold the information to over a thousand cybercriminals all over the world. The information was accessed over three million times, and Experian didn't even notice until the Secret Service tactfully nudged them and pointed out the situation.

As for the accountability of data brokers, well, there's basically none. Although the industry does have (voluntary) guidelines on how their information is used, and some companies like Acxiom give you the chance to opt out of their marketing products and request certain reports about yourself, they don't really seem to give a shit about government officials. The Federal Trade Commission, which is supposed to watch this kind of thing, freely admits that they have no idea how many data brokers even exist. When a Senate committee investigated the industry in 2013 and asked the biggest data broker companies to disclose their sources and clients, the brokers presumably pointed out exactly what kinds of lists the good Senators themselves were on, because absolutely nothing came of it.

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