Seems like someone went with the wrong headline. Having 4 other officers out of the Sherrif's Office living out of state is the bigger story (this is noted at the end of the story). Tennessee & Texas? That seems nuts. In comparison your Police Chief is doing his best, at least he's there.
We've seen plans like Stargate before. No matter how well intentioned, this will be the result. It's a robbery of the people the telecom and tech industries have pulled repeatedly.
Illegal collusion and price fixing happens when owners of competing companies communicate to set prices.
Apartments prices were historically a highly volatile compared to their lease lengths. One would have to own a majority of the apartments in a market to gain the data necessary to know things like upcoming tenant renewals, apartment renter influx/outflow, etc to combat things like mass-tenant exodus to a nearby apartment complex offering $100 less rent per month. This industry has been historically very competitive.
Realpage does the colluding for them inside a database and whispers back "here's our number".
How are non-participating properties punished? Debt Servicing. Try getting business loans for these properties without running Realpage's tools.
Look at the investors and board members of RealPage, InvesTran, etc. and those in the property management companies. They are a very small circle hiding normally illegal activity behind algorithms.
Encrypting or obfuscating illegal communications doesn't suddenly make them legal. Neither does charging money for the privilege.
It gives the property management insight into rates charged for similarly sized and accommodated properties within their area. It starts as a means to compete in a market where rates aren't posted on the walls. Very quickly as the software becomes industry standard the dynamic reverses, and multi-property owners use it as a form of data-washing, knowing their competitors use the same software, as a means of price fixing without "speaking" to one another.
This part of RealPage's offerings is a commercial price fixing collusion tool, plain and simple.
- Disclosure: I formerly wrote software for and was employed by RealPage, though not on this specific product.
Believable. I spend a lot of time on this screen and it's been killing performance & Webex sessions. Another place to find this sort of problem is to show full log after a build.
While this is not new news, these sort of things do warrant reminding of every once in a while to keep it fresh in the new generation's minds. I worked for a few ISP's late nineties/early 2000's. I distinctly remember the day the image of the closet door was received by us all, indicating the first direct wire tap of the backbone fiber near MAE East. After that most of us tech support types tried diligently to inform the public, and even found ways to route around MAE East. No one believed, and very few cared to learn about their routing. These days it's nearly impossible to find a clean unenveloped route.
Folks, it's never been rumor. No, not every packet you send is recorded. But the US government's systems are always decades ahead of any pattern matching tech you think you've seen, and those rule sets and capture filters are almost certainly run on all your traffic. Being a joint enterprise of public/private entities, that shadow version of you exists for the involved groups and governments to review, analyze, and run tests against.
If you use systems that ask your personal preferences, collect personal information, or collect your location data: lie absurdly to it constantly. Being random about it gets your more diverse advertisements, and being more specific about it across platforms makes it easy to spot when something is trying to advertise on the sly, or when your info gets somewhere it shouldn't have.
You can't stop the NSA finding out stuff about you, if they want it, they'll get it. But why make it easy on any of the fuckers? If they want to sniff your business, let them smell the whole asshole.