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Don't Build a Database of Ruin
Hugh Pickens writes "Paul Ohm writes in Harvard Business Review that businesses today are building perfect digital dossiers of their customers, massive data stores containing thousands of facts about every member of our society. He says these databases will grow to connect every individual to at least one closely guarded secret. 'This might be a secret about a medical condition, family history, or personal preference. It is a secret that, if revealed, would cause more than embarrassment or shame; it would lead to serious, concrete, devastating harm,' writes Ohm. 'And these companies are combining their data stores, which will give rise to a single, massive database. I call this the Database of Ruin. Once we have created this database, it is unlikely we will ever be able to tear it apart.' Consider the most famous recent example of big data's utility in invading personal privacy: Target's analytics team can determine which shoppers are pregnant, and even predict their delivery dates, by detecting subtle shifts in purchasing habits. 'In the absence of intervention, soon companies will know things about us that we do not even know about ourselves. This is the exciting possibility of Big Data, but for privacy, it is a recipe for disaster.' According to Ohm, if we stick to our current path, the Database of Ruin will become an inevitable fixture of our future landscape, one that will be littered with lives ruined by the exploitation of data assembled for profit. The only way we avoid this is if companies learn to say, 'no' to some of the privacy-invading innovations they're pursuing. 'The lesson is plain: compete vigorously and beat your competitors in every legitimate way, except when it comes to privacy invasion. Too many companies have learned this lesson the hard way, launching invasive new services that have triggered class action lawsuits, Congressional inquiries, and media firestorms.'"
According to Ohm, if we stick to our current path, the Database of Ruin will become an inevitable fixture of our future landscape, one that will be littered with lives ruined by the exploitation of data assembled for profit.
No doubt, but what we need is a path forward that avoids the pitfalls of ubiquitous databases while retaining the benefits.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I, Anomalous Coward, I am involved in a sexual relationship with a goldfish.
Basically, if I can make up enough too-crazy-to-be-true BS and post it all over the internet, nobody will know how much I am attracted to giraffes.
DAMMIT.
Shouldn't that read "Too few companies have learned ..."? Otherwise the problem would not exist.
Anyway, I think this can only be fixed by legislation. Companies have too much monetary incentive for privacy violation to do anything else than token improvements. "Industry self-regulation" is nothing but newspeak for "foxes guarding the henhouse".
That's why everyone I know that's a diabetic gets a ton of calls from India call center scammers...
All the time here people are drivelling on about the "privacy violations" of shopping in a big chain store and paying for it with their credit card which lets the stores build up a picture of their buying habits.
I suppose these are also the same people I see wandering around the streets in stained clothing screaming "STOP LOOKING AT ME! STOP LOOKING AT ME!" to nobody that the rest of us can see.
He missed a vital element when writing 1984. Looking at the oppressive governments of the time and the rise of extensive government monitoring, it was easy to imagine governments of the future would be able to take it to an extreme. He completly failed to see the rising power and influence of commercial interests, motivated not by power but by money.
. . . than how come I am not interested in any of those products that Amazon tells me should interest me?
Maybe there is something wrong with me?
Maybe not conforming to their purchase expectations is a sign of criminal activity . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Pay in Cash, don't use store discount cards. Don't let "them" tie the purchase to you. Problem solved.
Or, take the discount, pay with your convenient credit card, and don't give a crap what they think they know about you.
Your choice.
Calling for commercial organisations to stop profiling their customers is about as worthwhile as asking a four year old not to eat that marshmallow you just placed in front of them.
The problem is Joe Average is just too willing to give up their information for the smallest of perks, be it filling out a personal survey to win an iProduct, or swiping their supermarket member card at every transaction to save a few percent.
yeah because you know, when cable tv showed up, it claimed zero ads on its premium non-movie channels.. now look at it.. tons of money and it's loaded with them.. You are purposely misconstruing the actions of advertisers.. if all they were doing was throwing up billboards, that's one thing.. active electronic surveillance of buying habits is COMPLETELY different.
I think of it more like this... a handful of organizations are aggregating everything there is to know about me. Between the sites I visit, the contents of my email and chats, my searches, my friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintences, what I buy or want to buy, things I read or watch, etc., maybe three companies have it all. Data storage is virtually free. Data collection mechanisms are simple and effective. Mountains of other data can be extrapolated from what they have, and these few companies are everywhere. And don't kid yourself that a browser plugin is hiding you effectively.
Now imagine those two or three datasources are compromised at some point, either by hack or by purchase. There's something in there that would make it impossible for a person like you or me to, say, be elected to a public office. I'm not even be sure what mine is, but there's something in there. Maybe it's me talking to someone on a dating site, or something I said via IM, or adding a certain book to a wishlist and forgetting about it, or watching some YouTube video.
Things are going to change at some point. We're either going to get a lot more liberal about what defines a person's character, or we're going to have to deal with data collection and security in a very different way. I don't know which, but either way it'll probably be a painful transition.
'Database of RUIN'?? Sounds like Paul Ohm is desperate to call first dibs on buzzwording the 'big data' phenomenon.
In any case, the potential nefarious uses of 'big data' are pretty clear. Since this is one of the greatest profit-making devices large corporations have discovered in recent years, it's hugely unlikely that ordinary people can 'stop' it via normal means.
Seems to me like personal cash purchases are the way to go wherever possible. But also (and I know, wrong place to say this) - is there not an argument to increase awareness amongst IT professionals about the impact of their undoubtedly excellent technical work in making all this happen?
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
diminished return safety paranoia does not really make anyone safer.. I'd rather have my freedom and my rights back, thanks. Without that, what are we really defending? If it's our lives, well lets just declare war on muslim countries and send them back to that stone age utopia they want to drag the world back to. I wonder if you'd have this same attitude if those three letter agencies decided based on the same bad heuristics and ever increasing amounts of out-of-context data that you were a 'threat to national security'..
A society with 'perfect history' at the individual level would have zero growth because individual risk would be too great to justify taking any chances whatsoever.
People don't even care. And sadly actively participate in their own destruction.
no he wasn't. In his future, the difference between the state and the corporation was zero. We're damned close to that now where one passes the puck to the other to get over some legal or functional limitation the other isn't limited by. When it's done, the puck gets passed back.
I dunno, but that sounds kinda Canadian, eh?
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
It's near impossible to buy something through a site with anything but a credit card.
Of human culture colliding with human technology. As long as we continue to honor our lowest primate drives, then the amplifying effect of technology will generate results with greater and greater negative impact. The good news, is that such circumstances would be unsustainable, precisely because they would be socially unacceptable. At some point human beings will communicate at the speed of thought through imbedded technology. Secrets will become passe even impossible. Humanity will have to evolve into a species that is capable with dealing in absolute truth, and it will not be a society any of us recognize today.
craiglist is already used for datamining user habits to burglarize home when they are likely empty.
Sure, but that's correlating data you choose to make public to the whole world. The bigger fear from the article is the stuff in databases that you think is private being combined in ways you do not expect.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is the dumbest article I've ever read.
Realistically, you have to look at a Wal-mart or a Bank of America or a Progressive and ask 'Are they really going to hold back on egregious privacy violations just because it's icky?'
The answer, of course, is hell no. As Corporate People they're rapacious sociopaths who'd happily burn puppies or African orphans to death for a few extra cents of shareholder value. There is no possible appeal to ethics here, the best you could do is appeal to possible corporate black eye that would outweigh the profit. Which I don't see.
And then of course there's Homeland Security with their Spy on Everyone Echelon type initiatives and fat pipes right from the heart of every telecom company.
Your Database of Ruin already exists somewhere(s). You've just got to assume it does and figure out how you deal with that.
I think we already seeing the initial phases of this. Non-totalitarian societies will adjust and normalize to be more accepting of digressions, and otherwise damaging historic and contemporaneous behavior which will be more transparent for more and more people. What seems like absurd levels of privacy violation today / yesterday, will be taken for granted in the future / present.
... But this is far from pre-determined, and these crude statistical models geared toward increased consumption of tomorrow; may in the near future give way to more holistic pictures of who we are with the disposal of much more computational resources and vastly more connected data about our increasing transparent existence. Independently of a slide towards totalitarianism; these databases and cognitive pattern recognition systems; could just as well support connections and social bridging of a cornucopia of personal identities; histories with digressions; and everything in between. If we expand access to build these system with human values we wish to amplify; it could just as well increase "freedom" "autonomy" and sustainable"well being" among the techo-societies participants.
To the extent of increased personal hardship from these databases; in non-totalitarian societies its unlikely to result in significant transition towards worse ( or better ) treatment of people outside social and political norms. People outside social norms have been "abused" in small circles for ages; in a larger more "anonymous" society the abuse is built into other layers of the social fabric ( id cards; state oppression etc ); Not to say all circles are created equal; but techno-deterministic dystopianism is a false premise. Technological social changes are bound to the societies in which they take place.
Within "our" global "democratic" "free market" capitalism context the macro implications of concentrated power being able to better micro manage public opinion with powerful tools for life pattern recognition models; may be more problematic then direct loss of privacy abuses that the article outlines. That is to say; all our search for "personal" connections with others may be easier to be mediated. i.e an online video chat "hang out" support group which is moderated by an inquisitive supportive digital agent. That in addition to connecting us to exactly who we needed to talk to and giving us heart felt sense of well being in the short term; is simultaneously creating voids in meaningful existence by commoditizing your values towards particular life style choices, entertaining distractions, and consumption habits that don't enable a sustainable social structure.
Where by every piece of information we look for and every social connection we make is mediated towards these "a-political" life style choices bounding political discourse and participation making it impossible to regulate such abuses enabling increasing concentration of power etc.; there-by creating a vicious cycle in which our autonomy is transformed even more dramatically then in the previous century of mass media consumption.
Which are already disappearing. Really? I have to explain the relevance of what I said to the topic? It concerns mass db merges over time to the point where it's basically one giant record of all purchases/recorded behaviors and the output of the heuristics that data was used with.
There are different levels of the word "public". You can look through my windows and see the interior. So that view is "public". Any burglar who wants to break in would have to come to my house and look inside to see if there is anything of value. If the same view is visible on Google Streetview, it is by far more public. Burglars can monitor thousands of addresses from their own home, without being seen themselves. This is why harvesting public data can be enormously evil.
The ability to pay anonymously is getting less and less by day. In Europe, it is not yet that bad that you are seen as a terrorist if you pay cash, but there are far too many places where you have to pay, but real money is not accepted. So you may think people are stupid if they pay with a credit card, but often there isn't even a choice.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Even worse is when this "database of ruin" makes FALSE categorizations/predictions about an individual and then treats them as such. It already happens.
Welcome to the future- guilty without proof, guilty until proven innocent, guilty without due process, guilty by association, guilty without even knowing it.
Murray Leinster figured this out in 1946.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I live in London. We have loads of convenience stores which employ no staff that speak English, and are more than happy to be paid in cash (Unlike previous posters, I have not found any that take cache). Many will take a random mix of Euros and pounds. I doubt they contribute to any databases, and if they do, it will be completely illegible and probably gibberish - like their tax returns.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Yes, they will instead invite the person who fondles baboons in his kitchen.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Heaven forbid we find out that we ALL have an asshole, no matter what our social or economic status. Maybe once we realize that we all have an asshole, everyone will stop being so ashamed of theirs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
he doesn't dwell on the large mistakes these analytics make.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The accumulation of all information about everybody and everything is unavoidable, so, society will evolve into one of two paths: either a paranoid dystopia where a secret elite controls everybody through fear, and all production of goods and services are controlled by the corporations, or it evolves into a society of free individuals who empowered by technology and social awareness become economically independent and free of the social pressures caused by obsolete ways of thinking. These new free people will join on a new form of government that peacefully will make the old one irrelevant. If you live in the USA you might think the paranoid dystopia is more likely, but if you see the youth in Europe, Latin America and Asia it'll be obvious that gradually a new free society is being built.
I can't help but believe that many individuals will set themselves up in business offering software, hardware, services and advice to people to help them confound the data-keepers.
Can't believe it's not already the plot of a hundred Sci-Fi novels
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
... presumably, this leaves us to deduce that in the database server room we would find the racks of ruin.
The Internet & Purchase Background Checker will be integrated into the Resume Keyword Checker to pre-screen applicants.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
What stops you from not having a membership card, and paying in cache ?
I tried that once, I dug a hole behind the tree at the intersection, put my money in, and left a square rock on top to identify the place. But the seller claimed they never got it.
Right, because perpetual growth is not the Holy Graal of every capitalist corporation.
I can already hear the advertising executive: "We have enough money already, no need for more ads".
Its interesting to note just how inaccurate some of these databases are. I challenged a friend of mine in the private detective biz to do a background check on me. They have addresses for me that I've never lived at. They are missing some important information about me, including underestimating my net worth by a few orders of magnitude (something that should be important for targeted marketing IMO). They are also missing the identities of many of my business associates.
Its also interesting to note that most of the missing financial information on me involves with foreign investments. In countries who have much better laws concerning privacy protection. So the end result on lax data protection in the USA will be to drive private capital offshore.
Have gnu, will travel.
Between Facebook, Google and the NSA this database already exists.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...will let us know all about the analysts, and their owners. Who drinks with the bigots, who is lying about their own lives. Who... is turning up to protest queer people being treated as humans... WHO is treating women as mere sex cattle as opposed to humans. They will know all about us... including what each of us knows about each of them.
Don't be silly. First, they'll never give you uncensored access to the database. Second, you'd never know who the analysts and owners were, they'd just have "names" that they assumed when they sat down at their desk, like you see now when the Indian help-desk person says his name is "Fred" or a cop who says he's "Badge Number 1001". And third, the people who really have power will be able to keep their own personal data masked "for security reasons".
Identity is clearly the focal point of this discussion. Do we admit the existence of polylithic identities, or do we insist that all of a single person's persona be linkable to their physical selves? The nymwars turned on this questions. I'd like to point out a comment by Jaron Lanier in the Q&A section of http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker:
"I'd like to hypothesize one civilizing force, which is the perception of multiple overlapping hierarchies of status. I've observed this to be helpful in work dealing with rehabilitating gang members in Oakland. When there are multiple overlapping hierarchies of status there is more of a chance of people not fighting their superior within the status chain. And the more severe the imposition of the single hierarchy in people's lives, the more likely they are to engage in conflict with one another. Part of America's success is the confusion factor of understanding how to assess somebody's status."
And I think this observation answers in the affirmative to the value of polylithic identity. Naturally, the above is anecdotal, and I am unaware of more rigorous studies, but statements to the effect of "...if you have nothing to hide" routinely spouted by generally privileged, non-minority, center-of-the-bell-curve folk grossly disregard the fact of the diversity of experience that people have (even themselves, if examined honestly).
Ohm's Database of Ruin spells the collapse of the carefully nurtured identities that people have created. This may certainly lead to violence and barbarism if Lanier's hypothesis holds, all in the name of profit, bureaucratic efficiency, and laziness.
You're the one who needs tracking, will you be the next bigot to shoot up a Sikh temple you mistook for a mosque?
Idiot. Of course I know the difference between a Gurdwara and a ,mosque. How can anyone who has studied Islam fail to? I expect that Michael Page was just a racist, and of course the Muzzies play the victim card as they do when they attack people (someone might retaliate), or someone else is attacked (the real problem's Islamaphobia).
If hating people who kill their kids is infantacideaphobia then I'm an infantacideaphobe. If hating people who subdue women is masocisaphobic then I'm a masocisaphobe. If hating people who want to kill others because of their faith is exognostaphobic I'm an exognostaphobe. As muslims do all of this then I am poud to be an islamaphobe.
Not to spoil a good game, but Resonance is a sort of what if about how this could happen. http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/resonance.html I would say more but I don't want to ruin it. Everyone should play it if you like point and click adventure games.
Even better is if *I* can get a copy of your information and correct it, just as with your credit reports.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
That sounds UNMUTUAL, number 41. No, I didn't say Commy-terrorist-pedo, I said something worse. To call you a commie, I'd have to have some proof, like you saying commie things to the last guy we called a commie, or a card in your wallet, or something. Otherwise, somebody might debate whether you're a commie at all. There could still be an honest journalist out there. We can't go calling eveyone we don't like a pedo, cause a few of them would still demand actual trials and evidence and stuff, and it just might make other people aware of what we are doing. But unmutual - that's perfect. If we say you are, you are. If our databases says you are, you are. No trials - you're auto guilty. Nobody can debate if you really are, because we get to define what it means, and it means whatever our database says.
Who is John Cabal?
Insurance companies already have this database.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I'll go on record here. I've bought sex toys from an overseas company online, as gifts for my ex. (That part's complicated). I used a Visa card to pay, so it's pretty likely that's integrated in a database. The point is, I'm extremely anomalous that way - what percentage of people are in a happy, long-term, successful monogamous relationship with the person they are no longer married to?
What I worry about here is not just the persons who might judge me for this, but the ones who would believe the literal truth in this case simply never happens, and I must be concealing something else. I'm concerned about the background check that goes to an employer who's really big about 'family values' style marriage, but more concerned about the 'progressive' employer who would be ok with my dating whomever I chose, and might even have a policy forbidding gender orientation discrimination, etc., but would drop me from their lists because I was in some undefinable way different and it's too much trouble to figure out if it's a harmless difference or one they already have procedures and policies to cover, or not.
Just about all of us have some area where we are in 'less than 1%' land. Something we share with less than 1% of the populace. That means 99% of people out there don't share the interest, but also that 80% or so really have no idea what the difference is. So when a report says, for example, that somebody is into Zydeco, 80% or so of the people dealing wiith that report may have no Idea what that is. Why bother to find out when you can waste-can that resume and move on, or flag that police report for the attention of higher-ups at homeland security just on the off chance that Zydeco is an Arabic word? Ubiquitous reporting makes such rejections and actions more and more a random thing, a sort of lottery. And it's legal to discriminate against Philatelists, say, even if you thought that term was gender, ethnicity or political party related, even in areas where it's illegal to discriminate on those actual grounds. You can think a Phillatelist means he's from an ex-Soviet periphery state, and fire someone for being one, and If you'd been right, you could be sued, but if you're wrong (and a damned fool), you can't.
Who is John Cabal?
Three weeks ago at Target they auto-printed out coupons for jock itch medication and then the next week I get coupons for hemorrhoid medication. So I asked my wife about it and she said, "Yeah, it moved. How did you know?"
Certainly everyone has secrets; nearly everyone, secrets which if widely revealed would cause embarrassment and/or shame (I, for instance, once worked for a defense contractor, and wore a tie while doing it). But true facts that would lead to serious, concrete, devastating, harm, of the "Married Governor of New Jersey being blackmailed by former gay lover" level? I don't think so many people have secrets that dire.
databasenation
All ya gotta do is rotate credit cards with a trusted circle of friends. My accounts buying record is that of a right-wing communist fundamentalist lesbian. You should see what I get in the way of targeted advertising...
Ok so you use an anonymous credit card... where do you get the items sent?
Oh, should I have sugar-coated that?
Why does Harvard Business Review always get credit for discussions and idea that people beat to death on Compuserve in the mid 90s?
Every rule has more than one consequence.