Part 1: The Hidden Violence Tax - How Privacy Violations Mirror Climate Change

This is part 1 of our 5-part series called The Power Cycle. This series aim to apply the feminist lens to common cybersecurity topics because this perspective is both underdone and, I believe, quite informative. By systematically excluding women's voices, I believe, we have built digital infrastructure that enables the very violence it should prevent.

We need to take responsibility for the fact that when we fail to include half of humanity's insights, we can cause real harm.

At Code Monkey Cybersecurity, we focus on the messy intersection where our humanity intersects with the technology we use. As part of this mission, we are documenting the human cost of treating women's participation as optional diversity rather than operational necessity.

On June 14, 2025, Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were assassinated in their Brooklyn Park home [18, 19]. Included in the killer's toolkit was notebook containing eleven data broker websites and a credit card. Total cost of this information was approximately $30. [20, 16] The true price? Two lives, and the shattering of our collective illusion that privacy violations are victimless crimes.

The Changing Climate of Privacy

It seems to me that the entire technology industry has created a culture where spectacular incompetence leads to women dying. Each death is met with a collective shrug and a 'we'll do better next time.'

Just as climate scientists spent decades documenting rising temperatures while oil companies funded denial campaigns, advocates for victim of domestic abuse have spent years documenting how data brokers enable violence while tech companies insist their products are neutral tools.

It seems to me we've somehow normalised what appears to be catastrophic negligence when it comes to women's safety in tech systems. Consider how we've spent decades treating gasoline as if its price at the pump reflected its actual cost. That $3.50 per gallon never included the hurricanes intensifying over warming oceans, the communities drowning as sea levels rise, or the climate refugees fleeing uninhabitable lands. We privatised the profits while socialising the destruction.

Now we're doing the same thing with data. That "free" Facebook account, those "convenient" targeted advertising services, that "innovative" internet connected thermometer—none of their price tags reflect the stalking victims who can't escape their abusers, the women murdered by exes who bought their addresses online, or the politicians assassinated with information purchased for less than the cost of dinner [28].

As data broker expert Jeff Jockisch observed after the Minnesota killings: "Data brokers get people killed every day—the problem is that cops just don't look for that as a methodology." [21]

The Insulation of Decision-Makers

The parallel runs deeper when we examine who makes decisions and who pays the price—in both the carbon economy and the data economy. Oil executives fly private jets between air-conditioned boardrooms [26, 27] while island nations disappear beneath the waves [25]. Similarly, tech executives hire private security and live in gated compounds [24] while domestic violence victims discover their safe house addresses for sale online [6].

Mark Zuckerberg's infamous motto "move fast and break things" takes on an eerie cast when we realise that the "things" being broken are women's safety networks, survivors' escape routes, and elected representatives [22, 23, 6]. These executives live in a different reality—one where privacy invasion is an abstract concept debated in parliamentary inquiries, not a daily terror of checking whether your abuser has found your new address [6].

In Australia, this insulation is equally stark. Tech executives in Sydney's Silicon Beach and Melbourne's innovation precincts debate privacy regulations in conferences while Australian women fleeing violence discover that their new addresses are readily available through commercial people search sites [36, 38, 46]. The disconnect between those who profit from data availability and those who pay with their safety spans continents.

The Gendered Geography of Harm

Just as climate change hits the Global South first and hardest, privacy violations create a gendered geography of harm. In Australia, one woman dies at the hands of a current or former partner every nine days [35]. Behind each death lies a pattern: technology-facilitated stalking that creates 'a sense of the perpetrator's omnipresence' [36], where abusers use 'online searches, public records, or going through your rubbish' to track and terrorise [37]. This isn't rare—half of all Australian adults have experienced technology-facilitated abuse [38], with one in five women experiencing stalking that increasingly relies on data broker searches and online surveillance [38]. For First Nations women, this geography of harm becomes a killing field: they're eight times more likely to be murdered [39] and 32 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence [40]. We live in the region with the highest rate globally of women killed by intimate partners [41]—a distinction that should shame us into action.

The Fatal Delay

With climate change, we had decades of warnings from scientists before governments began to act. With privacy violations, we've had over a decade of warnings from domestic violence advocates, women's safety organisations, and feminist technologists [32, 31, 30]. In the US, they documented how abusers used data brokers to track survivors across state lines. They showed how "public" information became weapons. [9]

Now, with dead legislators in the US, US Senator Ron Wyden declares: "Congress doesn't need any more proof that people are being killed based on data for sale to anyone with a credit card" [16]. But advocates have been providing that proof for years—it just involved women's bodies, not politicians'. [10, 11]

To be clear, this is not theoretical. The infrastructure for data violence is operational and unprotected. In January 2025, security researcher Matt Brown discovered that hundreds of police license plate recognition cameras were streaming directly to the open internet without passwords [42]. According to the 404 Media report, around 170 unencrypted ALPR streams were found, many completely open to the internet without any authentication required [42]. Freeman demonstrated that with just 10 strategically placed cameras, you could track regular movements of people throughout a city. The data was so detailed that within 20 minutes, Wired had collected information on nearly 4,000 vehicles [43]. Within days, privacy advocate Will Freeman had built a tool that automatically captured these feeds, performed OCR on license plates, and dumped everything into a spreadsheet—creating real-time tracking of thousands of people's movements [42]. Australian media didn't cover this story, perhaps because acknowledging that stalkers could be watching our roads in real-time from their bedrooms is too uncomfortable a truth. Or maybe it was not considered newsworthy because 'privacy violations' are not really associated as closely with 'tools for domestic abuse' as they should be.

The Real Price Tag

If we actually accounted for the true costs, the price of a data broker search wouldn't be $29.99. It would include:

• Every woman who couldn't escape her abuser [6, 7, 8]
• Every one of the 88,214 family violence incidents Victorian Police attended in 2019-20 [39]
• Every stalking victim who had to relocate again
• Every life ended by someone who bought an address online
• Every moment of terror when someone realises they've been found [31]

If Vance Boelter had to pay the true cost of those eleven data broker websites in his notebook, he couldn't have afforded Melissa Hortman's address. She and her husband would still be alive.

The Path Forward

It seems to me with need to think of this issue similar to how doctors used to not wash their hands between autopsies and delivering babies - they weren't evil, they just genuinely didn't understand the connection between their actions and women dying of childbed fever. The tragedy wasn't their malice but their confidence that they were doing everything right while women kept dying.

The tech industry has a similar problem with data and violence. Most engineers and executives would be genuinely horrified if you showed them a direct line between their system and a woman's death. They're not monsters, they are just trying to ship code. I don't know how, but it seems the industry has developed such strong cultural antibodies against seeing these connections that even well-meaning people end up building dangerous systems.

This isn't about evil people but about a profession that hasn't yet understood its responsibilities. Just as we're finally starting to price carbon emissions into our economy, we need to price violence into our data economy. This isn't about privacy absolutism or Luddite rejection of technology. It's about honest accounting.

This makes the Minnesota assassination problem both more tragic and more solvable. It wasn't unpredictable —it was an invoice for a bill we've been refusing to pay for decades [34]. Every domestic violence victim tracked through data brokers, every woman harassed using "publicly available" information [11], every stalking facilitated by our surveillance economy—these were all down payments on a debt that came due in blood.

We can no longer afford to externalise the cost of privacy violations any more than we can afford to externalise the cost of carbon emissions. Because in both cases, the bill always comes due—and it's always paid first by those who can least afford it.

The question isn't whether we'll pay the price for our data economy. We're already paying it. The question is whether we'll keep letting the most vulnerable pay with their lives while the profitable system that allows their deaths continues unchanged, or whether we'll start to ask for a more honest accounting.

References

[7] Fight for the Future. (2024, October 10). Anti-Domestic Violence Organizations Call on Congress to Pass the Delete Act. https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-10-10-anti-domestic-violence-organizations-call-on-congress-to-pass-the-delete-act/

[8] Privacy.org.au. (2023, December 5). For domestic violence victim-survivors, a data or privacy breach can be extraordinarily dangerous. https://privacy.org.au/2023/12/05/for-domestic-violence-victim-survivors-a-data-or-privacy-breach-can-be-extraordinarily-dangerous/

[9] National Network to End Domestic Violence. (n.d.). Technology Safety. https://nnedv.org/content/technology-safety/

[10] Women's Aid. (n.d.). Virtual World, Real Fear. https://www.womensaid.org.uk/virtual-world-real-fear/

[11] Sherman, J. (2023, October 30). People Search Data Brokers, Stalking, and 'Publicly Available Information' Carve-Outs. Lawfare. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/people-search-data-brokers-stalking-and-publicly-available-information-carve-outs

[16] Orenstein, W. (2025). Vance Boelter letter to Klobuchar, Walz on MN assassination. Star Tribune. https://www.startribune.com/vance-boelter-letter-klobuchar-walz-mn-assassination/601376682

[18] CNN. (2025, June 14). Melissa Hortman Minnesota assassination. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/14/us/melissa-hortman-minnesota-assassination

[19] ABC News. (2025). 2 Minnesota lawmakers shot in targeted incident, officials say. https://abcnews.go.com/US/2-minnesota-lawmakers-shot-targeted-incident-officials/story?id=122840751

[20] ABC News. (2025). Gov Walz, Rep Omar, dozens of Minnesota Democrats on gunman's list. https://abcnews.go.com/US/gov-walz-rep-omar-dozens-minnesota-democrats-gunmans/story?id=122847427

[21] TEISS. (2025). Murder of Minnesota lawmaker sparks scrutiny of data brokers' role in targeting public officials. https://www.teiss.co.uk/news/murder-of-minnesota-lawmaker-sparks-scrutiny-of-data-brokers-role-in-targeting-public-officials-15957

[22] Privacy Guides. (2022, April 4). Move Fast and Break Things. https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2022/04/04/move-fast-and-break-things/

[23] The Oxford Student. (2020, December 2). Move fast and break democracy. https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2020/12/02/move-fast-and-break-democracy/

[24] Wired. (n.d.). Millions Silicon Valley Spends on Security Execs. https://www.wired.com/story/millions-silicon-valley-spends-security-execs/

[25] Earth.org. (n.d.). Tuvalu's Sinking Reality: How Climate Change is Threatening a Small Island Nation. https://earth.org/tuvalus-sinking-reality-how-climate-change-is-threatening-a-small-island-nation/

[26] The Times. (2024). Private jet flights to COP29 climate summit hypocrisy. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/private-jet-flights-cop29-climate-summit-hypocrisy-wm57hbqps

[27] The Guardian. (2024, November 15). Fossil fuel bosses get the red carpet at COP29 despite concerns over influence. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/15/fossil-fuel-bosses-get-the-red-carpet-at-cop29-despite-concerns-over-influence

[28] Brennan Center for Justice. (n.d.). Closing the Data Broker Loophole. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/closing-data-broker-loophole

[30] Technology Safety. (n.d.). Privacy Matters. https://www.techsafety.org/privacymatters

[31] UNSW Newsroom. (2023, December). For domestic violence victim-survivors, a data or privacy breach can be extraordinarily dangerous. https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/12/for-domestic-violence-victim-survivors--a-data-or-privacy-breach

[32] Tech Policy Press. (n.d.). Domestic Violence: Urgency, Data Safety, and the Intersection of Privacy and Technology. https://www.techpolicy.press/domestic-violence-urgency-data-safety-and-the-intersection-of-privacy-and-technology/

[34] Chicago Tribune. (2002, January 6). Online firm gave victim's data to killer. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2002/01/06/online-firm-gave-victims-data-to-killer/

[35] Mission Australia. (2024). Domestic and Family Violence Statistics. https://www.missionaustralia.com.au/domestic-and-family-violence-statistics

[36] Woodlock, D. (2017). The Abuse of Technology in Domestic Violence and Stalking. Violence Against Women, 23(5), 584-602. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077801216646277

[37] 1800RESPECT. (2024). Stalking and monitoring. https://1800respect.org.au/violence-and-abuse/stalking

[38] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2023). Stalking and surveillance. https://www.aihw.gov.au/family-domestic-and-sexual-violence/types-of-violence/stalking-surveillance

[39] Safe and Equal. (2022). Family violence statistics. https://safeandequal.org.au/understanding-family-violence/statistics/

[40] ANROWS. (2023). Domestic and family violence lethality: The facts about intimate partner homicide. https://www.anrows.org.au/publication/domestic-and-family-violence-lethality-the-facts-about-intimate-partner-homicide-html/

[41] Our Watch. (n.d.). Quick facts about violence against women. https://www.ourwatch.org.au/quick-facts

[42] Koebler, J. (2025, January 7). Researcher Turns Insecure License Plate Cameras Into Open Source Surveillance Tool. 404 Media. https://www.404media.co/researcher-turns-insecure-license-plate-cameras-into-open-source-surveillance-tool/

[43] Greenberg, A. (2025, January 7). It's Shockingly Easy to Access Police License Plate Cameras. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/deflock-alpr-license-plate-reader-vulnerabilities/

[46] 1800RESPECT. (2024). Stalking and monitoring. https://1800respect.org.au/violence-and-abuse/stalking[6] Electronic Privacy Information Center. (2023). Data Broker Harms: Domestic Violence Survivors. https://epic.org/documents/data-broker-harms-domestic-violence-survivors/