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hilbert42

"example: phones off during day, on from 1am-5am then shut off again, no facebook browsing at all, etc."

So if one uses an old fashioned feature phone without internet then one automatically becomes a target.

Similarly, I have a smartphone but no Facebook account so I must be a target.

Well good luck to them I'm pretty boring.

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"Must be a target" in the sense that you're included in an early subset of data that is filtered on abnormal behaviors who will get additional filtering applied to them. Pretty sure the next step isn't tapping your phones and assigning you a tail but applying extra filtering. I'm not in intelligence but I've worked with psychiatry data before and it became boring and routine to identify people with previously undiagnosed mental disorders via data analysis with relatively small amounts of data compared to population-level scales. The intelligence agencies of the world surely know about slightly paranoid techies and have a behavior profile that allows false positives to be filtered out in another pass.

"Used a feature phone at odd hours for years but began leaving their phone behind to go pull large quantities of cash from the ATM according to bank records, followed by a new circuitous route around town where they don't live or work or have associated friends or family according to traffic cameras" is much more interesting.

> "Used a feature phone at odd hours for years but began leaving their phone behind to go pull large quantities of cash from the ATM according to bank records, followed by a new circuitous route around town where they don't live or work or have associated friends or family according to traffic cameras" is much more interesting.

Or they're a slightly paranoid techie going to a dispensary

You can easily become a target for surveillance without doing anything illegal - and that's still (potentially) not a good fate! Paranoid technies might not like the idea of langley, and fort meade listening into to all of their communications.

I don't think that they just "filter it out", I think that spying on techies/industrial spying and technical espionage has never been bigger. I also think anyone working in AI right now is for sure at serious risk of being designated for advanced targeted surveillance.

If you had a cell phone that was only on between 1am and 5am, that would be mighty suspicious.

And believe it or not, not having a Facebook account does cast a shadow which makes you more interesting and mysterious. Why don't you want to telegraph your entire social graph to the world? What are you hiding?!

But in all seriousness, none of these are making you a target of anything by itself. If you are _already_ a target then they make you an interesting outlier that needs deeper investigation.

If you want to be boring in data it has look like other data. Sometimes being absent entirely in data is interesting.

> Why don't you want to telegraph your entire social graph to the world? What are you hiding?!

I remember in the earlier days, 10+ years ago, that was -exactly- how people looked at me whenever I said I don't have a Facebook account. I'm glad most people are out of that mindset, at least, even if it makes me seem like a target.

There is more of a fragmentation of social media networks now than before. More corporations are trying to enter that business I guess. In effect, this makes it less of a chock to say that you don't use Facebook, because you could easily be using another platform. So given that you don't use Facebook there is a lower probablitiy that you are avoiding social media entirely, hence less drama.

"Target" is likely inflaming some people here.

To use the neutral -- it makes you an outlier or ab-normal (different than normal).

Being separated from an average profile doesn't mean you are anything. It's exclusionary, not inclusionary.

Which other groups you fall into (privacy-concerned techies, terrorists, aficionados of pistachio ice cream, etc.) would require inclusionary signals.

And absent living off the grid, you're likely not going to mask exclusionary signals, simply by virtue of most people creating them 24/7. That's a lot of "side work" to artificially keep up with.

"To use the neutral -- it makes you an outlier or ab-normal (different than normal)."

I'd turn this around and question why a large percentage of the world's population is mindlessly following a modern fad as if they were a pack of lemmings.

Something has gone seriously wrong with the social order.

A combination of monetary incentive on the supply side (from big tech and big media, as centralized, larger-scale products are more profitable) and modern technological capability (smartphones providing computing platforms to most of the world, networked via cellular data)?

There's far less profit and incentive in making decentralized, smaller user base products.

Humans evolved to mimic each other. Fads, fashion, culture, dialect, accent, manners, shared knowledge - the same root.

> Humans evolved to mimic each other.

Why didn't you use the word 'monkeys'?

Its untrue and derogatory. While both primates, humans don't have any monkeys as ancestors. The term monkey is applied to humans when someone wants to belittle their behavior, often when we want to point out that one group is lesser than another group who does not behave that way.

It's true and derogatory. But it's just derogatory for humans who have an exaggerated view on themselves. Stanford's Robert Sapolsky had an excellent course on Behavioural Biology. You can watch it for free.

While monkeys and hominids (apes, humans & chimpanzees) are both primates, they are separate groups that have evolved separately. Any inherent behavior we share with monkeys either came from a common ancestor or was co-evolution.

It is derogatory because it is used to belittle and dehumanize. It has and is commonly used by people with an exaggerated view on themselves to slur other groups, most famously against Africans. Monkey behavior is assumed to be lower and less desirable, and something that should be overridden in humans or be corrected for. Correctly defining things as human behavior (even if primitive behavior shared with our ancestors) is neutral, identifying it as natural and default behavior inherent to our species, and not a joke or slur.

Yes, the Sapolsky lectures are excellent and still hold up IMO.

Sorry, I confused monkeys and apes. In german, we have no nice single-term for monkeys, just Affen for Primates and Menschenaffen for Hominidae, and I didn't thought about that before.

But it makes not much difference. A friend of my wife once gifted her a capuchin monkey, so I could observe the astonishing behavioural similarities to humans (human children) first hand. Since then, I see more and more of them, especially in group behaviour.

And, btw, I don't give a damn how other people use the terms.

"Why don't you want to telegraph your entire social graph to the world? What are you hiding?!"

I'm not expecting you or anyone to believe this but I find the whole concept of Facebook boring, in fact mindbogglingly mind-numbing.

What's missing from people's lives that makes them addicted to Facebook? After all, humankind has survived and managed without Facebook for all of human history save the past couple of decades.

Given a normal distribution of interests, statistics would suggest there's likely a few more like me tucked tightly down one end of the distribution curve.

I think lots of us find Facebook boring and aren’t addicted to it, but have an account. It isn’t at all hard to believe that you find it boring and don’t have an account. Most people don’t have Facebook accounts.

> Similarly, I have a smartphone but no Facebook account so I must be a target.

I'm sure they have a variety of "typicality" profiles for the significant fraction of the non-criminal population that doesn't use social media. In terms of being a target of investigation, all you have to worry about is if you deviate too much from those profiles.

"...they have a variety of "typicality" profiles for the significant fraction of the non-criminal population..."

I'd be curious to know if it's fact or otherwise but I'd assume it's correct. Like the curious person I am, I'll follow a link in a story to a related matter that of itself is innocuous but it contains a link to some 'darker' site, and so on.

Thus, it doesn't take long to end up on sites that are 'questionable' and one realizes it's not a good idea to be seen hanging around them despite the fascinating info that they often contain.

It seems this is an occupational hazard for curious nerds such as me. ;-)

Like all things, I think the signal being described is just one type of indicator/filter. When used alone, it probably narrows down but not to numbers a mere mortal could handle. When combined with additional filtering, it probably helps reduce down to numbers that is much more manageable.

If you only used "owns a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird" to indicate a serial killer, we'd have a lot of false positives of serial killers.

It's a combination of factors, not a single one. You can have your phones off all day at work, and one in the middle of night, but be on Facebook and that is only 2 out of three factors that would in the example make your device suspect.

Becomes part of initial data set. I do share your annoyance, but the only way this does not happen is if the data is not collected at all. I am not entirely certain this is even possible without some major upheaval in our societies.

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