Dataland: the Emerging Dystopia 81
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."
Re:Dataland or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Predictive purposes? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
People still cling to the idea of using the past to predict the future.
Years ago I knew a guy who played the lottery a lot. He kept a list of all the previous winning numbers and spent countless hours studying the numbers looking for patterns that would allow him to predict future winning numbers. It never worked.
All of this data collection is essentially the same thing.
A data score? (Score:2, Insightful)
Currently banks and lenders can ask a clearing house about our finacial activities and get a standardized credit score that can then be used to assess the risk of making a loan.
With ubiqitous data collection, we are already seeing the sale of lists of users who might be interested in a given marketing campaign, i.e. Target sending pregnacy sales/coupons to teens whose parents didn't even know yet.
It seems that at some point, organizations will want to know "How good is the available data on a given individual?" For a millenial who posts every minute of their lives online, it is likely that the available data is very high and pretty reliable. For a non-technical individual who carries out most of their activities off-line on a cash basis, the available data is pretty sparse and not very reliable.
Will data collection, big data, and continuous surveliance by business and governments lead to a data score similar to ones credit score? Will people be refused jobs/clearance based in part on this score? How would such a score and organizational behavior affect our society?
Re:Predictive purposes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Predictive purposes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, no; lottery numbers are known to be random. With human behaviour you at least have the underlying assumption that there are habits being picked up on. If all big data studies were as fruitless as your friend, the investments into the necessary infrastructure and algorithms wouldn't have made it nearly as far as they have. They do, however, find a lot of stupid correlations.
But much more importantly, the desire to find these correlations is potentially profound in its ability to damage society. The whole scheme is an effort to cheat the normal boundary of personal space in order to optimize business and surveillance efficiency. If this erosion spreads into everyday interactions between people, it'll be the end of trust. To fix it, we'd need who-knows-how-many Hollywood blockbusters about noble savages re-teaching the West how to act like decent human beings.
Perhaps if these businesses and government agencies were more willing to act like your friend and actually accept that life involves risk, we wouldn't be heading down this slippery slope so quickly.
You have no record? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Predictive purposes? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Using the past to predict the future" is what we usually call "learning". Even goldfish and flies to it, and it has brought us all our science and technology. Why do people exit the door at the ground floor rather than windows 5 stories up? Because past experiences has taught us that things fall down, and that falling far is harmful. Why do you type words rather than random chains of letters? Because you predict from past data that people in the future will be able to read and understand them. Even the fact that lottery numbers are impossible to predict is a prediction about the future we make based on physical understanding (which we have learnt from data from the past) coupled with data about how the lottery process works.
You probably didn't mean to make as strong a statement as what you did but you basically said the single most anti-intellectual thing is is possible to say.
Re:Predictive purposes? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not really the same. Human behaviour is not inherently random. The lottery is. If I've bought a coffee every day for the last year, it's quite likely I'll buy one tomorrow. I thought everyone knew about Bayes?
It is not fully predictive though.
One day, for whatever reason, you will stop buying coffee. That approximate day that will happen is not predictable because it is random.
So, you buying coffee tomorrow is quite predictable. You buying coffee 5 years from now is not.
Prediction Troubles. Manipulation Destroys (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Prediction Troubles. Manipulation Destroys (Score:2, Insightful)
This stuff you're talking about is all behavior driven by the need to keep up appearances. Guys in the US have to drive trucks or they're not going to get laid. You need to own a large mcmansion or there is obviously something wrong with your finances. Even the pharma stuff is like that. You should hear my relatives bragging about how many prescription pills they need to stay alive.
Pop culture is the driver. You need to be conversant on americal idol or the latest failures of your football team at the water cooler, or risk spending lunches by yourself. Conversely, publicly worrying about the NSA makes you some sort of conspiracy paranoiac and once again, solo lunches.
Ads have something to do with all this, but are certainly not the cause. Media manipulation is present, but the cause of all this is peer pressure.