Hacker News Reader

Comment by csharpminor | Hacker News Reader

It's not about nerds and suits, it's about how frequently we are exposed to data collection. Credit reporting agencies collected a powerful set of data (personal finance information), but you wouldn't really notice it until you applied for a loan, mortgage, or credit card.

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.

View on HN

>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.

It's also important to understand that the knowledge of how to utilize this data to better control your actions has grown exponentially too. And the scale of computing power lets that manipulation be tailor fit to you as a target. We know exactly what to show you, when to show it to you, and in what order so that we can influence your behavior.

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.

> 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.

Would be careful with that. AFAIK priming studies generally fail to replicate.

Never heard of this phenomenon, any study/source info?

http://freakonomics.com/2011/07/14/the-mere-sight-of-an-amer...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com