Instead of deleting your account you could also play with how algorithms perceive you. For example, if you are gay or depressed you could copy the Facebook likes of straight and upbeat people. Small hacks like this would influence how the algorithms of databrokers categorise you.
That matters, because algorithmic background checks are everywhere now.
This week I launched a website for this: https://www.cloakingcompany.co... (not a real company, it's meant as an awareness project, but it actually works)
The main thing to understand here is that there are two types of data:
- Your raw data
- Their 'derived data'
This 'Derived data' (as the databroker industry calls it) is where the real value is. These algorithmically formed 'opinions' about you are the valuable distilled product they sell. In the USA this derived data doesn't belong to you. It's protected as a form of corporate free speech.
In the EU this is a little different, as these 'opinions' are also considered personal data. The question is to what extent you get access to it. For example, the threshold for personal data is when a piece of data can be traced back to less than 11 people. So the trick here is to create opinions about small groups of which you are a part. For example: knowing that someone with cancer lives in one of three adjacent houses, that is not considered personal data.
Of course they are. This is part of a larger trend of new security companies that focus on the 'human element' in security issues, looking for 'insider threats'.
One example is/was RedOwl, which creates scorecards for managers that rated employees on things like:
- Medial leaker
- Saboteur
- "Negligent"
It does this by grabbing all data is can get its hands on, including scanning email inboxes and monitoring employees social media.
Slashdot commenters want to have it both ways:
- Users are too dumb to know what they are signing up for. #sheeple
- Users knew what they were signing up for, no use crying over it now.
In 1995, French philosopher Giles Deleuze, building on the work of Foucault, perfectly explained what is going on here in his 3-page text "Postscript on societies of control". We are moving from societies of discipline to societies of control, he explains.
Discipline
- A system punishes people once they break the rules (law), but not before.
- Transparent and accountable, at least in current western societies.
- Ultimately builds on the governments monopoly of power. You play by the rules because the government has tanks.
- Expensive.
Control
- Permanent measuring and nudging, whether you are guilty or innocent.
- Increasingly hidden in datacenters and proprietary algorithms.
- Weaponizes social control by making social interactions measurable (social media), and thus designable. You play by the rules because you want to stay included in society.
- Cheap, as you are basically crowdsourcing control to the people, who themselves apply the pressure to each other.
All societies have both systems. But the social control system used to be informal and difficult to 'design' (although the Stasi already had a working beta version). That has changed with the rise of the internet, which has allowed us to cheaply measure and record everything. Couple that with the rise of psychological knowledge (nudging, etc), and you have a pretty interesting substrate.
The Chinese seem to have read Foucault and Deleuze's work better than we in the west did. At least they know that they're building..
Here in the west this could be a useful narrative to steer clear of this possible future: https://www.socialcooling.com/
For example, here in the Netherlands a similar system is used in Dordrecht. It's extremely untransparant, where the makers say they want to avoid the hassle of a public debate..
Source: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/...
China is another obvious example. They use data to pinpoint students with potential psychological issues.
Source: https://www.volkskrant.nl/buit...
Big data is feeding our impulse to be risk averse. The question is what this does to students in the long run. See also: https://www.socialcooling.com
I use apps that turn off my wifi when the phone is not connected to my home and work cell towers. But that privacy effort is negated if I am suddenly expected to send out another wireless signal just to listen to music.
This is why Apple's claim to champion privacy seemed a little two-faced to me when they went in this direction.
There's a lot of rage against the clock in this thread, without much in the way of good arguments, and with a lot of name calling.
Personally, I think it's great.
- It's an effective hack of the discourse. After all we're talking about it.
- It's beautiful in that it's a visual metaphore, one which we all get. The angst of getting close to a deadline. Rarely are scientists able to bring across their message in a way that is more emotional than numerical. And that alone should be applauded.
- For me, the position on the clock resonates. Not having experienced the Cuban missile crisis, I can tell you this is the first time in my life that I consider nuclear war as a potential outcome of our current situation and trajectory.
What is wrong with attention seeking peaceniks? Isn't peace what we all want?
There was some research about that on slashdot recently:
"Nearly 40% of those who participated in the survey said they were concerned about connected-home devices tracking their usage. More than 40% said they were worried that such gadgets would expose too much about their daily lives. Meanwhile, the vast majority of consumers think gadget makers weren't doing a good job of telling them about security risks. Fewer than 20% of survey respondents said they were very well informed about such risks and almost 40% said they weren't informed at all."
A common misperception is that money from profiling is mostly made form advertising. An FCC report from 2015 points out that most money is made from 'risk management'. So the bigger picture is that your data is used to create detailed profiles about you which are bought by your bank, insurers, employers and politicians.
https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-87...
An perhaps useful bit of context is that in bij 2020 the Chinese government want to implement the Social Credit system, which will give every citizen a single score that represents how well behaved they are, and which will influence the ability to get a job with the government, get a cheap loan, etc. Both Tencent and Alibaba group have been running large scale reputation scoring pilots. Alibaba's version is called "sesame credit" and is based more on your purchase data, while Tencent's version is based more on what you say and share online.
This would be a logical continuation of that development, and is another signal that the Chinese government is using their mega companies as a testing ground for things that will eventually become state operated.
I do doubt that this will be anything more than a pilot, although a large scale one. In the end the Chinese government will want to run this system themselves, as they do with the credit system.
An perhaps useful bit of context is that in bij 2020 the Chinese government want to implement the Social Credit system, which will give every citizen a single score that represents how well behaved they are, and which will influence the ability to get a job with the government, get a cheap loan, etc. Both Tencent and Alibaba group have been running large scale reputation scoring pilots. Alibaba's version is called "sesame credit" and is based more on your purchase data, while Tencent's version is based more on what you say and share online. Over 100.000 Chinese have been boasting about their scores online.
This would be a logical continuation of that development, and is another signal that the Chinese government is using their mega companies as a testing ground for things that will eventually become state operated.
I do doubt that this will be anything more than a pilot, although a large scale one. In the end the Chinese government will want to run this system themselves, as they do with the social credit system.
Sources:
- Planning document for the social credit system: https://chinacopyrightandmedia...
- BBC on the Sesame Credit pilot: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
- Under normal circumstances your phone doesn't listen (or take pictures) continuously.
- These devices are designed to listen across the room, using complex microphone arrays.
- With these devices you don't just make a decision for yourself, you make it for all your visitors.
- When you raise your phone in front of your face to take a pic, you are visually signaling this action, and others could protest or escape. With these systems it becomes a game of hide and seek - it becomes unclear if it's happening.
- When you buy these devices you buy these devices, which are not as vital as a phone, you are implying that you don't see a problem with a culture of surveillance. You vote to embrace it, using your wallet.
Always this silly 'we already had this, it's not new' argument. Scale matters! Details matter!
- listen for other trigger words than "ok google" locally.
- send only metadata: when and how often these words were spoken.
- if household speaks these in above average quantities, change databroker profiles accordingly.
Triggerwords could be things like: "diabetes", "gay", "cancer", "drug deal", "lonely", screams, crying, tv jingles.
-or-
Send a fingerprint for audio? Kind of like the reverse song detection on Google phones? Serverside machine learning might be able to deduce or reconstruct things from that.
It's a start, but might retort that they are more worried about neighbours in their physical vicinity than a nameless corporation.
I then explain that the data we produce is used to create and improve thousands of reputation scores, which are increasingly affecting job chances, mortgage costs, and even online dating prospects.
To understand that better you also have to explain how deep learning algorithms compare your data to that of others who are more transparent, and this allows databrokers to deduce things like your IQ, psychological profile, gullability, etc.
What I'm saying is: things have gotten so complex that metaphors often fail me.
Thing is, the trade off doesn't even have to be there. Things can be 'smart' without using the cloud. We just have to demand they work this way.
For example, Nest thermostats didn't work during an internet blackout, leaving people in Canada freezing. Many 'smart' things use the cloud because their designers followed the trend or wanted access to behavioral data.. not because it's a good design.
- Under normal circumstances your phone doesn't listen (or take pictures) continuously.
- These devices are designed to listen across the room, using complex microphone arrays.
- With these devices you don't just make a decision for yourself, you make it for all your visitors.
- When you raise your phone in front of your face to take a pic, you are visually signaling this action, and others could protest or escape. With these systems it becomes a game of hide and seek - it becomes unclear if it's happening.
- When you buy these devices you buy these devices, which are not as vital as a phone, you are implying that you don't see a problem with a culture of surveillance. You vote to embrace it, using your wallet.
Always this silly 'we already had this, it's not new' argument. Scale matters! Details matter!
Your room and its contents says a lot about you. This data can be used by databrokers to update thousands of reputation scores about you. Deep learning algorithms could seek correlations with (mental) health, poverty, ambition, etc by comparing your room to that of others whom they know more about.
It doesn't matter that these are spurious correlations, or that they are wrong a lot of the times. As long as it allows some risk to be managed, then their clients will happily pay for these 'opinions' about you, which they will treat as fact.
"Why did they put that killer in jail, when he brushed his teeth every day?"
Your first assumption is that you can weight these things against each other, and your second assumption is that this must be done. Why?
The only place where boiling ethics down to a boolean is effective is in Hollywood movies.
Slashdot Mirror
And even on Slashdot algorithms are "AI" now..
Instead of deleting your account you could also play with how algorithms perceive you. For example, if you are gay or depressed you could copy the Facebook likes of straight and upbeat people. Small hacks like this would influence how the algorithms of databrokers categorise you.
That matters, because algorithmic background checks are everywhere now.
This week I launched a website for this: https://www.cloakingcompany.co... (not a real company, it's meant as an awareness project, but it actually works)
The main thing to understand here is that there are two types of data:
- Your raw data
- Their 'derived data'
This 'Derived data' (as the databroker industry calls it) is where the real value is. These algorithmically formed 'opinions' about you are the valuable distilled product they sell. In the USA this derived data doesn't belong to you. It's protected as a form of corporate free speech.
In the EU this is a little different, as these 'opinions' are also considered personal data. The question is to what extent you get access to it. For example, the threshold for personal data is when a piece of data can be traced back to less than 11 people. So the trick here is to create opinions about small groups of which you are a part. For example: knowing that someone with cancer lives in one of three adjacent houses, that is not considered personal data.
You are assuming that people only care about legal consequences.
Lots of people have warned about the societal consequences of what Facebook is doing.
It's like saying "we never got sued for burning massive amounts of coal" while lots of people have warned you about global warming.
Of course they are. This is part of a larger trend of new security companies that focus on the 'human element' in security issues, looking for 'insider threats'.
One example is/was RedOwl, which creates scorecards for managers that rated employees on things like:
- Medial leaker
- Saboteur
- "Negligent"
It does this by grabbing all data is can get its hands on, including scanning email inboxes and monitoring employees social media.
I've captured their old website here:
http://www.creepycompanies.com...
Victim blaming 2.0..
Slashdot commenters want to have it both ways:
- Users are too dumb to know what they are signing up for. #sheeple
- Users knew what they were signing up for, no use crying over it now.
In 1995, French philosopher Giles Deleuze, building on the work of Foucault, perfectly explained what is going on here in his 3-page text "Postscript on societies of control". We are moving from societies of discipline to societies of control, he explains.
Discipline
- A system punishes people once they break the rules (law), but not before.
- Transparent and accountable, at least in current western societies.
- Ultimately builds on the governments monopoly of power. You play by the rules because the government has tanks.
- Expensive.
Control
- Permanent measuring and nudging, whether you are guilty or innocent.
- Increasingly hidden in datacenters and proprietary algorithms.
- Weaponizes social control by making social interactions measurable (social media), and thus designable. You play by the rules because you want to stay included in society.
- Cheap, as you are basically crowdsourcing control to the people, who themselves apply the pressure to each other.
All societies have both systems. But the social control system used to be informal and difficult to 'design' (although the Stasi already had a working beta version). That has changed with the rise of the internet, which has allowed us to cheaply measure and record everything. Couple that with the rise of psychological knowledge (nudging, etc), and you have a pretty interesting substrate.
The Chinese seem to have read Foucault and Deleuze's work better than we in the west did. At least they know that they're building..
Here in the west this could be a useful narrative to steer clear of this possible future:
https://www.socialcooling.com/
Deleuze's text:
https://cidadeinseguranca.file...
Systems like this are everywhere now.
For example, here in the Netherlands a similar system is used in Dordrecht. It's extremely untransparant, where the makers say they want to avoid the hassle of a public debate..
Source: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/...
China is another obvious example. They use data to pinpoint students with potential psychological issues.
Source: https://www.volkskrant.nl/buit...
Big data is feeding our impulse to be risk averse. The question is what this does to students in the long run. See also:
https://www.socialcooling.com
I use apps that turn off my wifi when the phone is not connected to my home and work cell towers. But that privacy effort is negated if I am suddenly expected to send out another wireless signal just to listen to music. This is why Apple's claim to champion privacy seemed a little two-faced to me when they went in this direction.
There's a lot of rage against the clock in this thread, without much in the way of good arguments, and with a lot of name calling.
Personally, I think it's great.
- It's an effective hack of the discourse. After all we're talking about it.
- It's beautiful in that it's a visual metaphore, one which we all get. The angst of getting close to a deadline. Rarely are scientists able to bring across their message in a way that is more emotional than numerical. And that alone should be applauded.
- For me, the position on the clock resonates. Not having experienced the Cuban missile crisis, I can tell you this is the first time in my life that I consider nuclear war as a potential outcome of our current situation and trajectory.
What is wrong with attention seeking peaceniks? Isn't peace what we all want?
There was some research about that on slashdot recently:
"Nearly 40% of those who participated in the survey said they were concerned about connected-home devices tracking their usage. More than 40% said they were worried that such gadgets would expose too much about their daily lives. Meanwhile, the vast majority of consumers think gadget makers weren't doing a good job of telling them about security risks. Fewer than 20% of survey respondents said they were very well informed about such risks and almost 40% said they weren't informed at all."
https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
A common misperception is that money from profiling is mostly made form advertising. An FCC report from 2015 points out that most money is made from 'risk management'. So the bigger picture is that your data is used to create detailed profiles about you which are bought by your bank, insurers, employers and politicians. https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-87...
An perhaps useful bit of context is that in bij 2020 the Chinese government want to implement the Social Credit system, which will give every citizen a single score that represents how well behaved they are, and which will influence the ability to get a job with the government, get a cheap loan, etc. Both Tencent and Alibaba group have been running large scale reputation scoring pilots. Alibaba's version is called "sesame credit" and is based more on your purchase data, while Tencent's version is based more on what you say and share online.
This would be a logical continuation of that development, and is another signal that the Chinese government is using their mega companies as a testing ground for things that will eventually become state operated.
I do doubt that this will be anything more than a pilot, although a large scale one. In the end the Chinese government will want to run this system themselves, as they do with the credit system.
Sources:
- Planning document for the social credit system: https://chinacopyrightandmedia...
- BBC on the Sesame Credit pilot: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
An perhaps useful bit of context is that in bij 2020 the Chinese government want to implement the Social Credit system, which will give every citizen a single score that represents how well behaved they are, and which will influence the ability to get a job with the government, get a cheap loan, etc. Both Tencent and Alibaba group have been running large scale reputation scoring pilots. Alibaba's version is called "sesame credit" and is based more on your purchase data, while Tencent's version is based more on what you say and share online. Over 100.000 Chinese have been boasting about their scores online. This would be a logical continuation of that development, and is another signal that the Chinese government is using their mega companies as a testing ground for things that will eventually become state operated. I do doubt that this will be anything more than a pilot, although a large scale one. In the end the Chinese government will want to run this system themselves, as they do with the social credit system. Sources: - Planning document for the social credit system: https://chinacopyrightandmedia... - BBC on the Sesame Credit pilot: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
If you looked at people's relationship to oil in the 1950's you might have come to the same conclusion. Yet look at where we are now.
The same thing will happen with data ("the new oil") and privacy.
Echo..
There are so many differences!
- Under normal circumstances your phone doesn't listen (or take pictures) continuously.
- These devices are designed to listen across the room, using complex microphone arrays.
- With these devices you don't just make a decision for yourself, you make it for all your visitors.
- When you raise your phone in front of your face to take a pic, you are visually signaling this action, and others could protest or escape. With these systems it becomes a game of hide and seek - it becomes unclear if it's happening.
- When you buy these devices you buy these devices, which are not as vital as a phone, you are implying that you don't see a problem with a culture of surveillance. You vote to embrace it, using your wallet.
Always this silly 'we already had this, it's not new' argument. Scale matters! Details matter!
Just as a thinking exersize:
- listen for other trigger words than "ok google" locally.
- send only metadata: when and how often these words were spoken.
- if household speaks these in above average quantities, change databroker profiles accordingly.
Triggerwords could be things like: "diabetes", "gay", "cancer", "drug deal", "lonely", screams, crying, tv jingles.
-or-
Send a fingerprint for audio? Kind of like the reverse song detection on Google phones? Serverside machine learning might be able to deduce or reconstruct things from that.
It's a start, but might retort that they are more worried about neighbours in their physical vicinity than a nameless corporation.
I then explain that the data we produce is used to create and improve thousands of reputation scores, which are increasingly affecting job chances, mortgage costs, and even online dating prospects.
To understand that better you also have to explain how deep learning algorithms compare your data to that of others who are more transparent, and this allows databrokers to deduce things like your IQ, psychological profile, gullability, etc.
What I'm saying is: things have gotten so complex that metaphors often fail me.
Thing is, the trade off doesn't even have to be there. Things can be 'smart' without using the cloud. We just have to demand they work this way.
For example, Nest thermostats didn't work during an internet blackout, leaving people in Canada freezing. Many 'smart' things use the cloud because their designers followed the trend or wanted access to behavioral data.. not because it's a good design.
Nest source:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...
There are so many differences!
- Under normal circumstances your phone doesn't listen (or take pictures) continuously.
- These devices are designed to listen across the room, using complex microphone arrays.
- With these devices you don't just make a decision for yourself, you make it for all your visitors.
- When you raise your phone in front of your face to take a pic, you are visually signaling this action, and others could protest or escape. With these systems it becomes a game of hide and seek - it becomes unclear if it's happening.
- When you buy these devices you buy these devices, which are not as vital as a phone, you are implying that you don't see a problem with a culture of surveillance. You vote to embrace it, using your wallet.
Always this silly 'we already had this, it's not new' argument. Scale matters! Details matter!
Your room and its contents says a lot about you. This data can be used by databrokers to update thousands of reputation scores about you. Deep learning algorithms could seek correlations with (mental) health, poverty, ambition, etc by comparing your room to that of others whom they know more about.
It doesn't matter that these are spurious correlations, or that they are wrong a lot of the times. As long as it allows some risk to be managed, then their clients will happily pay for these 'opinions' about you, which they will treat as fact.
The same thing goes for your face. They will claim they can read your BMI, sexuality and even if you're a criminal from just your face.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.031...
http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...
https://www.rt.com/news/368307...
As a Google CTO put it in 2012: "all data is credit data, we just don't know how to use it yet".
This reminds me of an earlier discussion about Apple's AR initiative.
Let's say IKEA creates an app that allows you to place virtual furniture in your living room.
Doesn't that mean that IKEA now has access to data about my livingroom?
You're honestly comparing a heroic fight for freedom with.. the creation of a technology platform that is mostly used for financial speculation?
Open Source software has always been used in myriad ways, and continues to be.
So the real question is "is there a profound shift in balance that we need to discuss".
I don't know.
What I do know is that the phrasing "now all about" is vague and tendentious. Perhaps someone can point to some recent research on the subject?
"Why did they put that killer in jail, when he brushed his teeth every day?"
Your first assumption is that you can weight these things against each other, and your second assumption is that this must be done. Why? The only place where boiling ethics down to a boolean is effective is in Hollywood movies.