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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?
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/