When Metadata Analytics Goes Awry

jfruh writes "When blogger Dan Tynan started seeing lots of Latvians in his LinkedIn People You May Know list, it was pretty funny, considering he'd never been to Latvia or ever met anyone from there. But now that shadowy spy agencies are using algorithms similar to LinkedIn's to see if we're terrorists, mistakes like this are a lot scarier. From the article: 'More than ever -- and online in particular -- who you know can be more important than who you are. In fact, who somebody thinks you know may be more important than who you are, especially if that somebody is a faceless government bureaucracy with limitless power to izjaukt savu dzvi (mess up your life).'"

Comments

Who is this Steve Lexus?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I created a new gmail id to get price quotes from auto dealers. And now Google keeps telling me I might now someone named Steve Lexus and wants me to add him to my circles. Well, at least they seem to have filtered out Jane Honda and Palvayantheeswaran Toyota and Poponopoulous Mitsubishi.

Re:Who is this Steve Lexus?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have a facebook account, but a few months ago someone mistakenly sent me an invitation to join. I didn't think much and deleted that mail, since I didn't knew the person and couldn't even read it since it was in arabic. Ever since then facebook has been spamming once or twice a week with useless stuff about some arab dudes I never heard of. It's really annoying, I have no fucking idea who these people are, I've never set foot anywhere even remotely close to that part of the world, it's absolutely impossible that my name can be mistaken for an arab name (since I'm european). The email address where I get FB spam is lastname.firstname@gmail.com and is quite old, it was actually one of the first gmail accounts ever (I got invited by a friend that had been one of the initial 1000 gmail beta testers, so probably in the first three days or so); besides it's plastered all over the internet, simply googling it will tell you I'm a mid 30's vegetarian guy that wears contacts and has contributed to a number of open source projects, currently has a samsung galaxy note 2, has a 20 year interest in photography, loves fountain pens and geocaching, owns a ten year old beat up yamaha xjr1300 with a headlight patched with duct tape, rides a bike to work some 8 or 9 months of the year, does volunteer work at an animal shelter, plays a fender p bass through a traynor amp and is presently employed by the security division of a major telco in southern europe. None of this is a secret, in fact all of this appears in the first 100 hits on google, yet facebook seems to think I'm arab because of a single mistaken invitation.

Their incompetence earned them a free procmail rule.

Re:Who is this Steve Lexus?

[jeffmflanagan]

Your loss. Jane Honda is really cute.

Latvians, Schmatvians

[cold fjord]

Time to worry about the real problems affecting people's lives.