The Hidden Violence Tax: How Privacy Violations Mirror Climate Change

On 14 June 2025, Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were shot dead in their home in Brooklyn Park. The man responsible, Vance Boelter, also shot and seriously wounded state senator John Hoffman and his wife. When investigators searched Boelter's vehicle, they found a notebook listing eleven data broker websites — people-search services that sell home addresses to anyone who asks — with notes on which ones were free [1, 2]. He has since pleaded guilty to the murders in a US federal court [3].

The information that led a killer to a legislator's front door cost somewhere between nothing and a few dollars. The true price was two lives — and the end of our collective illusion that privacy violations are victimless crimes.

The changing climate of privacy

We have become experts at not seeing the true cost of things. For decades we treated petrol as if the price at the bowser reflected what it actually cost. It never included the intensifying storms, the drowning coastlines, or the people forced from uninhabitable land. We privatised the profits and socialised the destruction.

Now we are doing the same thing with data. The "free" social media account, the "convenient" people-search service, the "innovative" surveillance business model — none of their price tags reflect the stalking victims who cannot escape their abusers, the women found by exes who bought their addresses online, or a politician assassinated with information purchased for less than the cost of dinner.

“Congress doesn't need any more proof that people are being killed based on data for sale to anyone with a credit card.”

Who decides, and who pays

The parallel runs deeper when you look at who makes the decisions and who pays the price. Fossil fuel executives fly between air-conditioned boardrooms while low-lying island nations watch the water rise. In the same way, big tech firms spend millions of dollars a year on personal security for their executives [4] — while domestic violence survivors discover that the data broker industry those same platforms feed has put their new address up for sale [5].

Silicon Valley's old motto — "move fast and break things" — takes on a darker cast once you ask what, exactly, got broken. In practice, the things being broken have included women's safety networks, survivors' escape routes and, now, elected representatives. For the people at the top of the industry, privacy invasion is an abstraction debated in hearings. For a survivor checking whether her abuser has found her new address, it is a daily terror [5].

The gendered geography of harm

Just as climate change hits the Global South first and hardest, privacy violations follow a gendered geography. Women — particularly women of colour and marginalised women — are disproportionately the targets of technology-facilitated stalking, harassment and abuse [6]. In Australia, stalking and surveillance are recognised as common features of family and domestic violence, and technology makes both cheaper and easier [7].

Women have understood viscerally, for years, what the industry discusses theoretically: that information access equals physical vulnerability. A tagged photo reveals a location. A people-search site turns a name change into a minor inconvenience. "Public records" become hunting licences. Legal scholars have documented for years how people-search data brokers facilitate stalking under the cover of "publicly available information" [8].

And the Minnesota murders were not the first killings the data broker industry has helped along. In 1999, a man obsessed with a young American woman named Amy Boyer paid an online information broker to find her workplace, then drove there and killed her [8, 9]. In 2020, a gunman who had assembled a dossier on US federal judge Esther Salas turned up at her New Jersey home and murdered her son [2]. Most victims in between were not famous. They were, overwhelmingly, women being stalked.

The accounting trick

When economists calculate GDP, they do not subtract the cost of climate destruction. When tech companies report profits, they do not subtract the cost in human safety. Both systems rely on the same accounting trick: keeping the real costs off the books.

Closer to home, the Qantas breach disclosed in July 2025 exposed the personal data of 5.7 million customers [10]. Security researchers assessed the attack as likely the work of Scattered Spider [11] — a loose criminal network associated with the online community known as "The Com" [12], whose members have been documented offering physical violence as a paid service: brickings, firebombings, even shootings for hire [13].

The convergence of digital and physical violence is not a bug. It is a feature of a system that refuses to acknowledge how online actions create offline consequences.

The fatal delay

With climate change, we had decades of warnings from scientists before governments began to act. With privacy, we have had well over a decade of warnings from domestic violence advocates, women's safety organisations and feminist technologists. They documented how abusers used data brokers to track survivors across borders. They showed how "public" information became a weapon [5, 8].

Only now, with legislators dead, are US senators declaring that no more proof is needed [1]. But advocates have been providing that proof for years. It just involved women's bodies, not politicians'.

The real price tag

If we honestly accounted for the true costs, a people-search lookup would not cost $29.99 — or nothing at all. Its price would include:

• §Every woman who could not escape her abuser because her new address was for sale.
• §Every stalking victim who had to relocate, again.
• §Every life ended by someone who bought a location online.
• §Every moment of terror when someone realises they have been found.

A data broker expert quoted after the Minnesota attacks put it plainly: what made this case unusual was not that data brokers were involved, but that the evidence of it was overwhelming [1]. Usually the paper trail is never looked for.

The path forward

We are at an inflection point. Just as economies are slowly learning to price carbon, we need to price violence into the data economy. This is not privacy absolutism, and it is not a Luddite rejection of technology. It is honest accounting.

The Minnesota assassination was not an unpredictable tragedy. It was an invoice for a bill we have been refusing to pay for decades. Every survivor tracked through a data broker, every woman harassed with "publicly available" information, every stalking made easier by the surveillance economy — these were down payments on a debt that eventually came due in blood.

The question is not whether we will pay the price for our data economy. We are already paying it. The question is whether we keep letting the most vulnerable pay with their lives while the system that profits from their exposure carries on unchanged — or whether we finally demand an honest accounting.

Melissa Hortman is dead. How many more invoices must be paid in blood before we acknowledge the true cost of "free"?