> Without naming the state you are from, what is it famous for?
Hard to tell if that's intentional data gathering or just someone innocently copying a common data-gathering question format from Facebook though.
This also goes for "the first letter of your last name plus the date of your mother's birthday are your <pop culture tag>".
Oh and all the cutesy little image processing tools like "what would you look like older/younger/as a different gender/if you were a cartoon" are there to train facial recognition algorithms.
Yet even supposedly sophisticated people fall for these.
Yes, teach your kid to be careful with their data.
But also, how many outfits are actually doing this, or is this currently a theoretic concern? If people are doing this, what are their goals? Are they meeting them?
Are there less obvious examples of the same thing?
I'm sure you can keep going with more points.
"What state are you from" seems like pretty innocuous information. I'll readily mention that I'm from Seattle if it's relevant to the conversation or asked directly, and I tend to think of myself as being on the more paranoid / pro-privacy side of things.
All the big players already have my address because I gave it to them, and a stalker should be able to work that information out pretty easily because I post in the Seattle sub-reddit and otherwise engage a lot with Seattle topics.
That's how they get you. It's a trap!
This is the way statistics work.
The threat is an aggregate threat. What happens when 150k people respond to a post.
If not, this just reads like a recipe for paranoia. What we've seen of ML really _isn't that good-_ my phone has full access to anything I've ever typed and its predictive keyboard rarely actually predicts what I'm going to say.
On Facebook. Yeah probably a good idea and not really paranoid considering Fuckerberg's history.
> What we've seen of ML really _isn't that good-_
... Yet.
And, after Brexit and Trump we've seen the difference a few percentage points can make. Add another point every couple years as the tech improves and you're mad not to be paranoid.
Cambridge Analytica?
Doesn't even matter if there's any truth behind the science. If the personality profiling works, they can apply their MODEL from the 270k responses they DID get, against every single other user's public profile information, and get a high-likelihood result.
Does that mean they can tell exactly what MY personality type is? (as much as that may or may not be a valid "thing") - - I doubt it. But can they locate a region on a map where around 180,000 of 200,000 residents fit into a particular personality type, and then target ads to that region with a degree of better accuracy than "random"? Absolutely.
Index that against voting records; (which is what the "fake election audits are for" why else do you think they started with Arizona which blew in an unexpected direction for them? Also Kobach's efforts in 2017 were probably actually a data-collection operation for the GOP) - and you have a good map for how to target campaign spending in the next election. I also assume the Census data is abused in this way, (by whichever party is in-power at the time).
"dont ever engage with anyone or anything for any reason whatsoever" is fine and dandy.
And it's like a Zombie Apocalypse: you can protect yourself from being bitten. But you can't protect yourself from the consequences of everyone else being bitten and turning into zombies and coming after you in such great numbers, that you don't have enough ammunition stockpiled for all the headshots you'll need. (That's my analogy for "people infected with racist (and etc) disinformation are gonna vote a certain way, whether you take in that disinformation or not.")
Tell me what kind of car you plan to buy next!