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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

These are the obvious things they can see in the photos. Not shown are the various assumptions they'll make about you based on your photos such as: gay, likely uneducated, high income earner, most likely republican, narcissistic, etc.

Also not shown is what they'll learn by the totality of the data they collect from your pictures such as how often you go on vacation, how often you're seen in new clothing and what kinds of clothes you typically wear, your health, what types of foods you eat, social graphs of everyone you're seen with and changes to your relationship status over time, how often you consume drugs/alcohol, your general level of cleanliness and personal hygiene, etc.

Even a handful of photos can give companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon massive amounts of very personal data but nobody thinks about that when they pull out their phones to take pictures or install a ring camera on their front door.

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Do you do any ML for Big Tech? Because it's actually a lot simpler than that: the input is the sum total of your activity, and the output is the likelihood that you'll click on an ad or buy a product on a specific surface. You certainly can predict demographic information like sexual orientation, education level, income, political party, and with a fair degree of accuracy, but all it does is add noise to the calculation you really want, which is optimizing the amount of money you'll make. To the extent that demographics are computed, it's to make advertisers feel better about themselves. They would almost always be better off with a blanket "optimize my sales" campaign, but it's hard for ad agencies and digital marketers to justify their existence that way.

> and the output is the likelihood that you'll click on an ad or buy a product on a specific surface.

Surveillance capitalism isn't really about ads. Increasingly that data is being used to impact your life offline. It influences how much companies charge you for their products and services. It determines what version of their policies companies will inform you of and hold you to. It determines very big things like whether or not you get a job offer or a rental agreement, but it's also being used to determine even small things like how long a company keeps you on hold when you call them. It's being used to make people suspects for crimes. It's being used against people in criminal trials and custody battles. It informs decisions on whether or not your health insurer covers your medical treatments. Activists and extremists use it to target and harass people they perceive as being their enemies.

The data you hand over to companies is being used to build dossiers stuffed with inaccuracies and assumptions that will be used against you in countless ways yet you aren't even allowed to know who has it, what they're using it for, when they use it, or who they share it with.

Nobody really cares about what ads they get shown when they use the internet so companies like to pretend that that's what their data collection is all about, and they absolutely do use it for marketing, but the truth is that digital marketing is a smokescreen for everything else that your data is being used for and will later be used for.

> You certainly can predict demographic information like sexual orientation, education level, income, political party, and with a fair degree of accuracy, but all it does is add noise to the calculation you really want, which is optimizing the amount of money you'll make.

How are all those data points noise? They're crucial information used for targeting ads to a specific audience. Advertisers pay extra for it, because it leads to more sales. This is not just a gimmick, but a proven tactic that has made the web the most lucrative ad platform over any other. Adtech wouldn't be the behemoth it is without targeting, and the companies that do this well are some of the richest on the planet.

They're noise in the sense that they are imperfect human categories that we superimpose on reality. The alternative is not knowing nothing about the user, it's knowing everything.

Take this simplified example. Say that you want to predict whether a driver will cause a car accident. You could run the stats and say that poorer, older, less educated, alcohol-impeded, sleep deprived drivers statistically cause more crashes, and then take an 80-year-old high school graduate with an income of $20K/year and say "He's three of those five categories, that makes his risk higher." Or you could observe footage of every minute of him driving, count the number of times he strays out of lane, turns without his blinker, doesn't look at the road, speeds, runs a red light, etc. Which is going to give you a more accurate picture?

Marketers build up demographic profiles because historically, that's all the information they have had available to them. The detailed record of everything their customer has ever done has been impossible to collect, or illegal for privacy reasons. Big Tech has that record. And they can use it to make much more accurate machine predictions about what a person will do than demographics alone can predict.

I'm not understanding your argument.

In your first post you said that computed statistics are there "to make advertisers feel better about themselves". I pointed out that those computed statistics are still very valuable, even if they're based on probabilities and not on tangible data. Of course that with more real-world data the statistics are more accurate, but the reality is that real data is likely unavailable for most users. If the only available data are a few pictures and behavioral records (what they liked, who they follow, etc.), then those computed statistics are still much better than nothing.

Besides, advertisers mostly care about demographics, since that's how companies define their target markets. And most of this information can be gathered from just a few sources, so the type of advanced data analysis in your example is not even required in practice. Whether someone is at risk of having a car accident would be more valuable to insurance companies, than for advertisers to decide what product to show them.

I understand that tech companies simply care about whether the user will click on the ad, video or like the next song or show. But can this also be used to change user's preferences or thought process?

For most people, it is too taxing to be on guard 24/7 and they have other things going on in their life that are more pressing like paying rent. I don't blame people for not thinking twice about that Ring camera because unlike most open-source solutions, "it just works."

That's why it would be nice for democracy to work and give us some enforced regulations

I agree fully but I'm going to play devil's advocate and say the person who just won the election won the popular vote so whatever you are about to get is democracy in action because the majority of people voted for what is about to happen.

No it isn't. A democracy only works with informed voters. The amount of lies and obfuscation spewed by Trump's campaign is a successful attempt to deliberately break democracy. They don't have a mandate to do much besides mass deportation because they didn't talk about firing the entire federal workforce during the campaign. Project 2025 does talk about that but Trump lied during the campaign and said he disavowed it.

I think oligarch Peter Thiel gave away the game in this clip at 3:26 where he says "you can make pro Trump arguments but that's the democratic question"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luTHVKFi3dc&t=3m24s

> No it isn't. A democracy only works with informed voters.

By that logic we can never have a working democracy because collectively voters will always be ignorant and misinformed to some extent. We can't force voters to educate themselves on the issues and can't stop them from lying to themselves or to each other. We can do things to improve the situation, just as there has been a sustained and coordinated effort to make the situation worse, but (gerrymandering aside) we don't get to pick our voters in a democracy.

The last election was as democratic as we should ever expect it to be. Having the freedom to elect our government, by necessity, means having the freedom to elect someone who will take our freedom from us, and if we've done that we'll have only ourselves to blame.

My real problem is with the claim that they have a mandate to tear the government apart. That's not what they told voters during the election. They don't have a mandate for that.

They absolutely told voters during the election they were going to destroy government. They might not have said "Project 2025 is how we are going to dismantle the government" but he said he was going to give himself the ability to remove "rogue" federal employees and overhaul or remove federal agencies.

Woah woah woah, let’s not get hasty here. Can’t we think of the shareholders for once?

> Not shown are the various assumptions they'll make about you based on your photos such as: gay, likely uneducated, high income earner, most likely republican, narcissistic, etc.

I uploaded a photo of myself as a child and based on the house in the background, the brand of shoes on my feet, and the clothes my dad was wearing, it flagged me as “middle class”, so at least one part of your claim is incorrect. I suspect this may be the same model google used internally

I uploaded a race photo and it said that I appeared economically comfortable because I was wearing running gear like a hydration pack.

Well, are you?

Sounds reasonable.

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