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:Predictive purposes? (Score:2, Interesting)
> 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.
Amazing.....that is the exact job description of a stock analyst.
Re:A data score? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Dataland or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Dataland or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying... (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you sure that cross checking is impossible?
https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [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 [nytimes.com]