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The Brutal Fight To Mine Your Data and Sell It To Your Boss (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report from Bloomberg, explaining how Silicon Valley makes billions of dollars peddling personal information, supported by an ecosystem of bit players. Editor Drake Bennett highlights the battle between an upstart called HiQ and LinkedIn, who are fighting for your lucrative professional identity. Here's an excerpt from the report: A small number of the world's most valuable companies collect, control, parse, and sell billions of dollars' worth of personal information voluntarily surrendered by their users. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft -- which bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 -- have in turn spawned dependent economies consisting of advertising and marketing companies, designers, consultants, and app developers. Some operate on the tech giants' platforms; some customize special digital tools; some help people attract more friends and likes and followers. Some, including HiQ, feed off the torrents of information that social networks produce, using software bots to scrape data from profiles. The services of the smaller companies can augment the offerings of the bigger ones, but the power dynamic is deeply asymmetrical, reminiscent of pilot fish picking food from between the teeth of sharks. The terms of that relationship are set by technology, economics, and the vagaries of consumer choice, but also by the law. LinkedIn's May 23 letter to HiQ wasn't the first time the company had taken legal action to prevent the perceived hijacking of its data, and Facebook and Craigslist, among others, have brought similar actions. But even more than its predecessors, this case, because of who's involved and how it's unfolded, has spoken to the thorniest issues surrounding speech and competition on the internet.
...it kinda sucks when someone takes information you thought was yours alone and sells it to the highest bidder, eh?
If the goal is to share information (like your resume to potential employers or customers) you can't keep it private (say, from your current employer, family, or your nosey neighbour).
If you publish information about yourself on the Internet... YOU'VE PUBLISHED INFORMATION ABOUT YOURSELF ON THE INTERNET.
Who is mining the sites and what they're doing with that information is more or less irrelevant, since you should be assuming everyone is doing whatever they want with it.
If you're gonna start doing this you have to go back to the beginning of the slide downhill when Microsoft allowed every home computer nationwide get backdoored by every local and foreign intelligence service in the name of security, then lied to the public when criminals also found the same backdoors and Microsoft said that the complete lack of security was the best possible effort. That's where the public perception of the value of privacy got so horribly skewed in the first place as to allow companies like Facebook to even exist and do business in this fashion.
They didn't break the law. That doesn't mean that there's nothing wrong with what they did.
The law doesn't define what's right or decent. Only what's legal. Big difference.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Last week the headhunters started piling up in my inbox. I mean, yes, I usually got the odd "don't you wanna reorient yourself" mail, but we're talking a flood of mails, with headhunters bending over backwards with offers that made me question their sanity.
But if they were mining what's publicly available about me, I can understand it.
You see, the game works both ways. You can dig up anything I put out there about me, but in turn, nothing I put out there about me has to be true. This system assumes that people are actually truthful when they write stuff about themselves. Beats me why this works, but it seems to.
Well, I am not truthful when I write stuff about me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, whatever.
According to my "social media" pages, I'm the hottest potatoe there is right now in security. I rub shoulders with the best and brightest in the field, there are pictures of me hanging out at a bar with some of the key players in the security world (Photoshop is one hell of a program), and it seems i held the keynote at some of the past Black Hats (hey, it ain't my fault if they use my page instead of Black Hat's as a source for their information!). I also complained about the cocktails at the bar there. And that Bruce Schneier can't really tell jokes. You know, spice it up a bit.
None of this is true. Nothing. I know Bruce, of course, I can truthfully answer yes if someone asks "you really know Bruce Schneier?". Of course I do, the whole security world does.
I just highly doubt that he has any clue who I could possibly be...
I would of course never lie to a potential employer. If they actually ask me whether I gave keynotes at Blackhat, whether I am on a first name base with Bruce Schneier, whether I really declined speaking at Def Con because I didn't like their attitude and that it's "too commercial" for my tastes and I got better things to do than give talks at "insignificant petty has-been cons" like my Facebook claims, I will of course tell them the truth.
That my Facebook page, along with the other social media pages, are tools to weed out the stupid and gullible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
These companies have a very narrow definition of employee quality that they peddle to insecure managers.
What they don't take into account is the influence their systems have on the level of 'psychological safety' that employees feel in organizations. The level to which they are willing to challenge dominant (but often wrong) ideas, or share new thoughts. In short, by over-measuring these systems actually limit the ability to innovate.
Ironically, one of the organizations that has pointed to psychological safety as the key factor for good teamwork is Google:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
A good example of a company in this 'human risk management' field is Red Owl, which recently got bought by another risk management company, Forcepoint. Amongst other things, their software aims to weed out potential whistle blowers.
A concept I've been working on to help us talk about the long term issues at stake here is "Social Cooling". The website explains the large scale chilling effects which are created by our unprecedented ability and desire to manage risk.
https://www.socailcooling.com/
FB runs a program identifying people on photos uploaded to it. This means that as soon as somebody does that to you, you are associated with FB. There is a FB crap on almost any webpage you visit. There are government services that are available only or mainly trough FB. There is no way you can escape this and I am sure similar can be said about others. You can of course hope that gov. has some interest in protecting its citizens (who pay for this service) from too much intrusion. These companies have more money in their vaults than some states do. So here it comes - corporate is as bad as state run. We allowed these companies grow so big that any protection can only come from another giant. I thought that putting FB into manually modified hosts file and registering an empty (not used) account with my name at FB is enough but my kids use Whatsapp so I do it too. The GP mail is an exaggeration. OTOH to get to Nuernberg 70+ ya was an act of angry and unforgiving people (and who can blame them back then). Maybe FB deserve the anger that GP feels. I can understand it - for those of us who realize what is going on and who are used to some degree of privacy current developments are a show of frustrating loss of influence over data about own life.
How is that any different than the information the employee publishes?
That's a good and logical question. I gave it some thought before posting.
Basically, there is a lot of asymmetry between an individual employee and a corporation. In the first place, of course, the employee is a single person - a private individual - whereas the corporation disposes of a lot more people and resources. But that's just the start. To the employee, the world of work is usually just part of life - perhaps the dominant part, perhaps just an unpleasant but necessary way of earning a living. The corporation, on the other hand, is not a real living person (although it is, by a legal fiction, treated as being a kind of "person"). It has no interests outside the world of its business, no affections, no fears, no human relationships or responsibilities. It has no spouse or children to care about (and worry about) and provide for.
The individual, in his or her private life, has occasion to socialize and exchange information with friends, acquaintances and family members. Such information may impinge, in some ways, on work, but only indirectly. A person may come home and vent on social media about the atrocious treatment he had to put up with at work; that is normal, understandable human behaviour and may meet with sympathetic responses that help to soothe the hurt. To the employer, however, it is a revelation of undesirable attitudes.
The corporation is run according to its various policies and the decisions of managers. It can choose to keep secret whatever it wishes; it has no private life, no feelings, no social intercourse. Unlike the individual human, its guard is always up; it never goes off duty.
The contest is like one between a human being - possibly armed - and a killer robot. Very one-sided. And even if the human being triumphs, the robot doesn't care even if it is destroyed.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.