If I happen to know that you like cheese sandwiches, is that really data? When did we decide that knowing something about somebody else was such a big deal?
I feel like this whole brouhaha about data has left me behind.
When data became a commodity that can be analysed, acted upon, sold and used to make predictions about groups or individuals.
Credit reporting agencies were always all about knowing something about somebody else en mass as a commodity that can be analysed, acted upon, sold and used to make predictions about groups or individuals. But these are companies best represented by people who wear proper suits and play proper golf. Nobody batted an eye.
Contrast that to today's barrage of tracking and advertising. Firefox Focus tells me to date that it has blocked 65k trackers in the past ten months. I mention a specific tool I need for a project to my dad, he searches for it, and then I see advertisements.
The "nerds" didn't forget to wear suits and play golf, they expanded the data collection net and feedback loop for advertisements to an unprecedented scale.
Exactly. It's intellectually bankrupt to suggest that tech is just like everything else before, all while conveniently ignoring the change in scale. Scale matters, and scaling up changes a system's implications and risks. It's irresponsible to think otherwise.
Just because I'm OK with using party poppers doesn't mean I want a flashbang to blow up next to me.
A very simple and generic example is if you prime someone with a picture of an American flag, they're more likely to vote Republican. So with a slight tweak to the algorithm, on election day we can guarantee more or fewer Republican votes just by changing the ranking of posts with a flag on Twitter.
And the more we know about you as an individual, the more we can control you by priming you in this way.
Would be careful with that. AFAIK priming studies generally fail to replicate.
The sheer scale of the intrusion as technology has advanced is the problem. You're not telling someone "I love pizza," they are stalking you across the internet and deciding that you must love pizza, because their mountains of data confirm it.
You won't have much luck getting these algorithms to change their mind about you, since they're pulling it from your browser footprint, your IP, your connected networks, social media buttons, cookies, data sold by companies you've shopped with, etc...
Why yes, Pampers, I am in the market for adult diapers. And denture cleaner.
While I think this may help maintain my privacy, I worry that on a societal level it may help us lose our sanity.
With accompanying HN discussions from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002995
If this technique became widespread, advertisers could compare users A,B C, and … Z to filter out the “random clicks” (since they would all just as equally click these advertisements). This will leave A’s extra clicks still in the data sets letting the advertiser build a profile for A.
I mean sure it _might_ work against something very basic but adnauseam is a bit more advanced than that. I also avoid trusting any marketing lingo as technological solution.
The fact is it would be very hard to catch this, even the most basic implementation. Not only that but it's absolutely not worth doing it as huge huge minority of profiles are compromised, we're talking 0.01% of all profiles here.
Plus, let's go to yellow pages and randint(1,999999) for a business listing and spend some time browsing that.
Plus, a random selection of Google trends in various niches.
Plus, maybe the best selling items in a few Amazon verticals.
Maybe toss in some "how to treat"+ WebMD topics.
How about beginning to target dating sites to your partner because they've figured out you are having affair before the partner has? Or divorce attorneys?
Or notifying your work recent changes in pattern make you look like a high flight risk? Or your insurance company that you may have an unreported condition? Same basic data sources can feed into that analysis.
Those are just obvious ones, and I'm not claiming they are specifically currently being done ... but the basic technology isn't a barrier.
This is why it is a bit disingenuous to echo the common refrain "what's so bad about better targeted ads" as if that adequately describes what is at stake.
And it's not just how it's used today. It's how it can be archived and analyzed 10 years down the road with all the additional information gleaned from you in that time.
And that's using 7 year old tech.
If one day I develop diabetes and start researching insulin and products, I don't need a company automatically sending me flyers for blood strips.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/31/the-post-office-will-now-e...
Oh look, now we historical catalog of all the customized mail that was sent to you, by companies who know what you're looking for.
And we all know how reliable and secure government and corporate databases are. /s
With the risk of pulling a semi-Godwin, you should visit the Stasi museum here in Berlin. It gives you a good insight into how powerful “knowing something about somebody” can be.
Except that the internet has made all transient data permanent (i.e. my jokes from high school are free to see on Twitter), and our social systems simply can't haven't kept up with this change.
Insurance is in a funny spot, because the whole premise of insurance is to protect against the unknown, but better and better data is making things known that weren’t before, requiring a change in pricing (lest their competitors beat them to it).
Would an individual change their practices if they were told that something they were doing was harmful? But, they were never given that choice. Instead, the data is collected, categorized, and sold. Insurance companies can collaborate all the data and extrapolate trends at scale.
Now, these insurance companies also have a fiduciary responsibility to lower costs and raise profits to their shareholders. What that amounts is that every insurance company will have to do the same, with slight variations. But we the populace will be worse off with unknown black boxes saying worse things about us (mortality, health, safety) and for us few ways to change things aside gross generalizations our doctors give us.
This is a thoroughly debunked lie
Yodlee almost certainly has a record of the vast majority of your credit/debit transactions. It doesn't sell the ability to advertise to you as a specific demographic, it sells that data directly.
If you log into the free public wireless network available in most areas, your presence at that location will be logged, correlated to your identity and sold. Again, Foursquare sells this data directly, not the ability to advertise to you.
Thasos sells your location history based on mobile data. Slice sells your location data based on mobile SDKs it provides developers in return for your data. I can go on and on.
Is there at least an attempt to anonymize this data? Usually, yes. Does that work in practice? Sometimes, often even. But frequently it does not. You need fewer than 33 bits of independent data to uniquely identify anyone on Earth. There are only so many other people in your area and age demographic who share similar waking hours, interests, habits and location data.
It is a myth that companies don't sell user data directly because it's their golden goose. Facebook and Google don't, but most of the data they have can be reconstructed independently from a variety of other sources that freely advertise it.
The problem becomes even bigger depending of the company agenda and the political context.
I get to decide who knows whether or not I like cheese sandwiches. If I am a free person,equal with you under the law then how is it ok for you to violate my consent and persistently stalk me to find information about me for your own gain?
If you eat lunch at the same place, and the guy who takes your order notices you like cheese sandwiches, did he "violate your consent"?
If the same guy happens to be in line behind you a few days in a row and notices that you always order cheese sandwiches, did he "violate your consent"?
I agree the behavior is a bit creepy in the same way I (very) mildly dislike it when the sandwich shop guy knows my order, but it is also unreasonable to expect information you share with others to be kept private. It's not "stalking" for someone to observe things about the world that were made available to them. To change that would necessitate some pretty ugly regulations that would infringe on the rights of everyone (including you).
I don't like that sort of thing because you can't depend on it. Even if you had the perfect workflow for it, what about any hotel booking you have that doesn't send an email for Gmail to parse, or Gmail can't parse it? Just seems like an annoyingly probabilistic system. Aside from the obvious issues of privacy and creepiness, like how did Google Maps get information that was supposedly just between me and the hotel?
But my girlfriend absolutely loved it. She just wished it also showed us our bus route and schedule like it apparently sometimes does for her.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
The rest of the content
is on page 2.
This is representative of the exchange a regular person gets when browsing mainstream sites without an ad blocker.
It's not "not personal data" because it's trivial. It's not "not personal data" because I voluntarily gave it to someone.
I only want sites to store data they necessary to carry out their function and only for as long as they need it to do so (note: keeping lights on with ads does not count as function).
Data and personal data are two different things. "Data" is any information. "Personal data" is information that is about you, connected to you, or identifies you personally. I recommend poking around at how GDPR defines personal data, for example, since it's at the heart of the new emerging global privacy debate.
https://www.itgovernance.eu/blog/en/the-gdpr-what-exactly-is...
https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/personal-data/
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...
> If I happen to know that you like cheese sandwiches, is that really data?
Yes. It's both data, and personal data.
> When did we decide that knowing something about somebody else was such a big deal?
That's not the issue. The issue is companies knowing something about everyone else, and selling that knowledge to people you didn't give it to, and using that knowledge to do things you don't really want, starting with advertising.
Is data really that ephemeral to people? Maybe its bc i worked with intelligence systems in my first career, but the idea of controlled data seems pretty straightforward. What i choose to reveal about myself should be in my hands, and part of that decision is brokering trust that ot isnt shared.
What Is Data? Its a record. It isnt handwavy to me or most.
If you don't think that's a big deal then you need to get to a point that it IS a big deal for you.
Okay I hear you saying “well maybe your rates should go up if you eat a lot of red meat. You’re costing everyone else a lot of money.” I’d say you have some highly misguided morals, and I’d say that such a scheme would never lead to savings for people who don’t eat red meat, but almost surely additional costs for those who do. The thing to remember is these schemes never, ever benefit you. They make other people money, generally at your expense.
Sure, sometimes (as a matter of probability). But are you really claiming that all data collection is a zero-sum game wherein only the collectors can possibly win?
Data collection isn't a zero-sum game. Between you and collectors, it's positive-sum game with you almost always having negative gains. At the society level, this game is embedded in the negative-sum game of advertising.
I mean MI5 might be tracking me right now, but it doesn't make any difference whatsoever until the point at which they take action.
[1] but not me!
What is asymmetrical information permanently captured?
Is ignorant coercion the same as consent?
So, yes, it is personal data.
People generally prefer freedom over being controlled and manipulated.
The only reality left is radical vulnerability. If google knows I was caught DUI one night 6 months ago because I was a couple percent over the limit driving home from a nice party, then everybody has to know. I have no choice but to tell the truth all the time, lest exposure be my downfall. This applies to every single bit of data gathered and every bit of information gathered from the analysis of that data.
There is a defcon talk that describes a German judge that jacked off to porn in chambers nearly every day and during times he really shouldn't be. No-one in his social or work life knew or was negatively effected. But these defcon engineers were able to deanonymize his data and reveal his behaviour. This applies to everybody now. Radical vulnerability is the only thing we have left to maintain social order. It's hell for those that want to minimize vulnerability for the sake of extreme competence.
People in positions of power or capital can access that information and I gain no social security or social safety from having secrets anymore.
If I happen to know that you like cheese sandwiches, is that really data? When did we decide that knowing something about somebody else was such a big deal?
It's whatever I want it to be, and I should be able to change my mind about it. It's not hard.
so FB/G send that advertising and you harvest the click-data and now have a catalogue of people that FB/G believe have heart problems. You then sell that data, or a company owning that data, or whatever, to insurance companies to use in their premium pricing.
If the information is going to be used to select users to show a particular advert to then that information is effectively able to be liberated to benefit the advertiser (the one buying the adverts on FB or G) or their customers (the ones buying the amalgamated data).
Then there's all the FB linked surveys, like "When will you die? Answer 10 questions to find out!" and that information just happens to be prime info for insurance people to use that they're not allowed to ask you for directly.
Maybe the survey company has to make a new "life metric" and sell that data to avoid the insurance company doing something they're not allowed, but surely this is how it's done?
As privacy and floss advocate "personal data" just makes absolutely zero sense. There's private data and public data. Private data is your passwords and stuff not exposed to public internet - everything else is public data and it's no longer "yours" unless it's copyrightable content.