Slashdot Mirror
Dataland: the Emerging Dystopia
An anonymous reader writes "Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's novel 1984, resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover in a failed attempt to escape the government's ubiquitous surveillance. Orwell was concerned with totalitarianism and explicit thought control enforced by police action. While that is still very much an issue for many of the world's residents, here in the West there is an unsettling feeling about a more subtle form of thought manipulation, as more and more of our activities are watched, cataloged, and analyzed by more and more institutions — governments, businesses, non-profits, political parties, mostly for predictive purposes. At least we have a name for it now: 'Dataland', a term suggested by Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research, who studies the sociological effects of networking technologies. Crawford has been written up in Slashdot before. She's criticized the indiscriminate adoption of Big Data analytics on several grounds, including the loss of anonymity, erroneous conclusions from skewed datasets, and the prospect of secret discrimination."
Reminds me of Google's data collection on its hard disk failures and hiring good programmers.
They couldn't find any sort of predictive factor. GPA, brain teasers etc had zero correlation. There was no hiring person that had statistically better performance at hiring good programmers.
There are some things that are just random.
Perhaps being able to predict accurately is the flying car of our generation. Or, perhaps some will say the answer is more data.
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics. That does you no good if they're looking for those demographics. The genie isn't back in the bottle.
At worst, the category "random/unclassifiable" gets flagged as suspicious in itself. (And no points for being an avowed Communist, even if you are reverent towards the Protector of Mexico.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The nice thing about inaccuracy is that (as long as you are tactful in your exploitation of the data) the user will never know if you fuck up; and if it becomes 'common knowledge' that people shrouded in mystery are usually passed over in favor of transparent choices, we'll probably start seeing advice on 'building persona', just as we currently have people interacting with financial institutions purely for the purpose of 'building a credit score'.
The absence of data is even more suspicious. No facebook, gmail or Linkedin account? Not carrying your cell phone or laptop when entering the country? What are you trying to hide? I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think you can put enough chaff into the system to make a difference. The botnets can sort it out pretty quickly.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Winston Smith . . . . . resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover "
I don't remember any bushes in that story.
You know, neither did I, so I checked and there was a new paged taped in with bushes in the story. I guess I was wrong, there were always bushes in the story.
"Winston Smith . . . . . resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover "
I don't remember any bushes in that story.
Exactly. Because Winston hid them, you never saw them.
+Turn On Mobile Phone only a few times a day to check for new calls.
+ Use Cash as far as possible
+ TOR
Sadly not; at best you can only exclude yourself from certain demographics.
I've come to the conclusion that the best way (as an individual) to handle this sort of thing is to create personas for different contexts. You'll need fake ids, but you won't be using them for anything technically illegal (no fraud, no underage drinking). You just show them to people/systems that want the info to track you - like loyalty cards (that you then only use with cash).
That way you end up with a handful of distinct personas that all have data trails but only have data trails in specific contexts so that cross-referencing is impossible.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Are you sure that cross checking is impossible?
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
And that's just one example. Truly big data will be essentially impossible to hide from completely. It doesn't need to reach a 100% positive result before people start treating it like it is, and that's only one possible problem that we should fully expect to arise from this.
Here's another that could make your idea less effective as well:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/15/business/attention-shopper-stores-are-tracking-your-cell.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
We wring our hands at the accursed sellers and buyers of our browsing habits. We glibly ignore what happens when we sit for a few hours in front of a television screen. Knowing our browsing habits gets us targeted ads. Getting our minds in a receptive mood by showing the trash that passes for content on commercial TV, then cramming crafty advertising into those receptive minds impels us to do things we wouldn't be predicted to do, which is manipulation.
Why do Americans lust after 2-ton gas-guzzlers to taxi the kids to school and fetch a couple of bags of groceries from the supermarket? Why does PHaRMA spend untold billions advertising expensive drugs that, in many cases, are no more effective than over-the-counter remedies? Why do so many of our people live in McMansions so expensive they are a paycheck away from foreclosure? Because advertising to minds pried open by "must-see" TV works.
The TV tells them what they want and how to get it - no money down, pennies per week. And this relentless barrage of hard, soft, and subliminal sales messages passes into the TV-watcher's mind with nothing getting in the way like critical thinking, priorities, or social or environmental concerns.
We ought to be more worried about what 10-20 hours watching TV every week is doing to us and our society than whether Google is showing us an ad for suntan lotion after we've booked a trip to the Caribbean.