Cash crop: a commercial data extraction threat model¶

The gate to the garden warns of corporate poachers who want to catalogue and clone every bloom. This is the model of how the cataloguing works: routine, contracted, continuous, and running on everyone at once rather than on a chosen few. No lock is picked. The harvest is legal, and that is the difficulty with it.

Where the surveillance model follows watching that answers to the state, this follows watching that answers to a balance sheet. A person is inventory here, profiled and priced and resold, rarely named and rarely of individual interest. The two meet where the state runs out of legal room: what it cannot lawfully collect, it can often buy.

It is the collection layer that the deanonymisation model later turns back into a name, captured before any name is attached.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-17.