Most Americans don’t realize what companies can predict from their data

https://theconversation.com/most-americans-dont-realize-what-companies-can-predict-from-their-data-110760

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

165 110 7 years ago

Is this the only reason the current house of cards stays up and functions? I think so.

Almost no one realises what companies predict and infer from their data, or the extent of its collection. Once they see some of the surface effects they start calling it creepy or scary.

If people ever start realising the true extent, expect a backlash, surely?

teddyh• 7 years ago

If people ever start realising the true extent, expect a backlash, surely?

No. Since it has been going on for so long, people, when they realize it now, will rationalize:

• To not have realized it for this long, I must have been stupid.

• I am not stupid.

• Therefore, I must be OK with what is happening.

And they will come up with numerous ridiculous rationalizations – fake reasons to be OK with the current situation, all to avoid admitting to themselves that they did not realize it.

everdev• 7 years ago

If people ever start realising the true extent, expect a backlash, surely?

I'm not sure. We seem to be in a sharing culture where we want to broadcast on the internet where we are, who we're with, what we're eating, what we think about current events, etc.

And it seems to be a source of pride to publicly identify with political groups and social movements.

So, I feel like people freely share much of this info.

mtgx• 7 years ago

Yes it is. And I always mention it on this board and others whenever people start concluding that "people just don't care about privacy."

It's not that they don't care, they just don't understand the true implications of having someone like Google or Facebook have pixel tracking on all websites on the web tracking you, or them tracking wherever you go, and the thousand ways in which that data could be misused by them, their partners, or people stealing that data from those companies.

I've noticed from other older stories that even pro-surveillance politicians don't understand what they are pushing for, as some of them were later "shocked" to discover that those very powers could also be used to gather information on them. And then they started singing a different tune about the surveillance powers spy agencies should be given.

echevil2• 7 years ago

It's not that they don't care, they just don't understand the true implications

Just to give you a data point since you drew that conclusion. I'm fully aware of the tons of the mechanisms website use to track you and all of it's implications. I am not concerned about it at all.

imgabe11• 7 years ago

For example, data about a mobile phone’s past location and movement patterns can be used to predict where a person lives, who their employer is, where they attend religious services and the age range of their children based on where they drop them off for school.

Is it me? I don't consider any of these to be particularly sensitive information.

Where you live: We used to have these things called "phone books" where they listed the name, address, and phone number of everyone in town. The world didn't collapse.

Who their employer is: My name and picture are listed on my employer's public website. Not exactly hard to find.

where they attend religious services: I don't, but of the people I know who do, nobody has ever considered it something they need to hide. Many would want to tell you and ask you to join them.

age range of their children: So? If somebody knows you have a kid aged 5-10, then they can...what?

I mean, I still try to limit how much information I expose online, but if anything this makes me less worried rather than more.

jacquesm10• 7 years ago

That's a rehash of a number of silly 'nothing to hide' pseudo arguments.

Phone books were not instantly searchable in bulk all across the globe. Who your employer is is not important, but in bulk to know who your employer employs and to be able to access that information in bulk and within a couple of milliseconds gives a lot of power to outsiders. I should know because I use that power regularly for my work, and trust me, lots of people we read up on would do better to keep a much lower profile online. It does not benefit their employers either.

Whether you attend religious services or not has been used to target (and kill) people in the past, and if you are willing to extrapolate a bit, was used for mass murder.

The age range of your children may not be so important, the fact that you have children may be, depending on your station in life.

The fact that you personally have not been inconvenienced by any of this - yet - is not a datapoint worth recording.

imgabe11• 7 years ago

Whether you attend religious services or not has been used to target (and kill) people in the past, and if you are willing to extrapolate a bit, was used for mass murder.

Right, it was, long before the ability to aggregate this information en masse existed. The fundamental problem there is that there are people who want to kill other people because of their religion. Taking away information from them doesn't solve the problem, it just delays it a little. It's a form of security by obscurity.

If anything, they can still go and target the actual place of worship itself, which is not hidden. If all they care about is killing people of a certain religion, they don't need to know who they are particularly, just go to the place of worship for that religion.

The larger point here, is that if we can't trust the authority figures, the government, the corporations, etc. It doesn't matter how well we hide. The problem of a fascist government can't be solved by hiding. It has to be solved by enacting a government that's not fascist.

Edit: This is not a "nothing to hide" argument. The information listed is not the sort that is private information. Your address is not a special secret that only you can know. There are numerous legitimate reasons that the government or a corporation might need to know your address. The government needs to collect taxes and keep property records. Companies need to deliver products that you order. All of that is going to require sharing your address.

buboard5• 7 years ago

This isnt a nothing to hide argument because there is fair trade of information, not compulsory extraction. Also the information is not publicly available

And the counter argument is an FUD theory that all information should be banned because it can potentially be misused

kodablah• 7 years ago

That's a rehash of a number of silly 'nothing to hide' pseudo arguments.

We shouldn't so dismissive of the "so what" attitude that is pervasive in this neverending stream of data collection articles. Many are using their opinion of "great harm" to influence their cries for oversight, I think it's only fair for others to use their opinion of "no harm" to counter it. GP didn't say they had nothing to hide, they said what was collected was harmless and that opinion, especially given the tradeoff in services received, is widely held and it's ok.

dontbenebby2• 7 years ago

Phone books were not instantly searchable in bulk all across the globe.

I think this is something that's overlooked. Think back to the 80s. A lot of things that are legal but would be creepy are very time intensive - following someone around takes time. If you photograph them you have to develop film (and you won't know if the photos turned out until then). And while it may have been legal, social norms said don't stalk people - don't expect a social life if you follow people around photographing them.

Now what would have been a week long horror montage is accomplished with a single web search and perusal of their Instagram.

ses1984• 7 years ago

Putting all this info together used to be much more labor intensive, basically infeasible to do at scale. The scale problem is solved, and now companies can mine that data for profit.

Maybe it's not that scary in a western society that's generally considered free, but imagine that power in a fascist state.

Broken_Hippo2• 7 years ago

Now pretend all this is public and someone stalks you. Maybe it is your abusive ex that occasionally sends you creepy messages and harasses anyone you date.

It isn't like we have many protections in place to keep the bad folks from the good. And I'll add that phone books didn't have everyone in town - only the person who paid for the line. For many, you had to look up their family member's or roomate's name to get their phone number and address. Your name and picture might be, but most people's are not. You might not want folks in your conservative town to know which brand of religion you follow. You might not want those folks in that conservative town to know you go to a gay bar most Saturday nights either.

imgabe11• 7 years ago

If someone is stalking and harassing you, we need the police to arrest them. Hiding your location data from Google isn't going to help that. The problem there is that an individual is breaking the law. I doubt very much they are finding your location because it's stored in an advertising database somewhere.

If you can't openly practice your religion or sexuality in a town, that is a failing of the people of the town. Either stand up for yourself or move to a town with better people. Again, this is not a problem that can be solved by hiding, and living your life having to tiptoe around core parts of your identity so that idiots won't be rude? That is a miserable way to live.

marcinzm4• 7 years ago

In general, when you're in the majority this information doesn't matter much since you're washed out among the crowd. When you're in a minority however it can be used for nefarious purposed by the right group. For example, the KKK may like to know all the black people who live in predominantly white neighborhoods so they can set a few crosses on fire. Or maybe, you live in a fundamentalist Christian town and prefer your neighbors not know you're not actually Christian since they'd harass you (and the cops would help).

imgabe11• 7 years ago

Is the KKK going to search through a marketing database to find out where black people live, or are they going to just drive around the neighborhood and see which houses black people go into?

The information flows both ways. We could also use location data to see who regularly attends KKK meetings and who was at the house at the time a cross was burned in the yard and then arrest them, which is ultimately going to be more effective in stopping things like that from happening.

grawprog• 7 years ago

For example, data about a mobile phone’s past location and movement patterns can be used to predict where a person lives, who their employer is, where they attend religious services and the age range of their children based on where they drop them off for school.

Well as far as google thinks I warp immediately from Vancouver to Calgary once I switch from wifi to data then back again every day. I'm guessing it has to do with my phone company but they always give me results from Calgary and show my location as being in Calgary based on my internet address.

throw2016• 7 years ago

This is a narrow and reductionist view that misses the scope and scale of the issue to make it personal when this is not personal.

Nobody is interested in the random individual so looking at this the purely personal level is pointless.

It's the ability to do this enmasse, 'collect' and 'collate', analyze and drill down to 'people of interest' and the power it gives the data holders that makes it toxic and ominous.

mattkrause3• 7 years ago

I’m not thrilled about the amount of information being hoovered up, but....the predictions being made with it aren’t terribly impressive.

Facebook should know a great deal about me, but the advertising categories it puts me in are either completely obvious (based on locations and group memberships that I’ve explicitly told it), or bonkers. It currently thinks I’m part of multiple wildly incompatible religions and political groups and am interested in a weird collection of abstract concepts (“decay”?)

Amazon thinks that my interests are dominated by textbooks and vacuum cleaners (if only!)

Twitter has correctly sussed out that someone who mostly follows scientists might be interested in science....or dogs.

robertAngst• 7 years ago

Came here to say this. From my own experience + an Amazon Software engineer agreed.

You can do lots with data, but in the end, many times its uselessly applied.

qaq• 7 years ago

Totally agree I wonder if they ever had a control group that they showed things in random just to measure how good their tech is.

marcinzm4• 7 years ago

Possibly, I used to work for a smaller ad company and one of the tests we did was random ranking of ads. Problem is that it can be a very expensive test to run so you wouldn't run it on anything except a tiny fraction of traffic.

nostrademons• 7 years ago

Dunno about Facebook/Amazon/Twitter, but Google uses a control group on every single experiment. They also usually have holdbacks (control groups over time, where the a small user population does not receive a new feature to measure the performance as people get accustomed to it) and ablation experiments (where a previously-launched feature is turned off for a small population of users to verify the expected loss in performance).

Advertising has always been a business of extremely large numbers. The chance that a given user will purchase a product because of an ad is imperceptible; aggregated over hundreds of millions of ads shown, imperceptible changes add up to large increases in sales. People tend to forget just how bad ads were before Google & Facebook; it's not that the latter have solved advertising, it's that TV, print, and billboards were so terrible that it didn't take much to improve markedly over them.

marcinzm4• 7 years ago

Amazon has emailed me multiple times to answer questions about an item I never bought (in the email they literally say "as the owner of" which I'm not). If they can't even get that right then I suspect they have a lot of data quality issues which would result in bad predictions.

luckylion• 7 years ago

I’m not thrilled about the amount of information being hoovered up, but....the predictions being made with it aren’t terribly impressive.

Conspiracy theory: what if they intentionally throw random garbage in there so you don't get paranoid? The things they want to hit you with will still be there, but they'll be surrounded by misses, and you're inclined to think "wow, they sent me an ad for a new dishwasher just as soon as mine broke, but they also sent me an ad for cat toys knowing full well I'm allergic to cats"? The dishwasher is still a great hit, but less suspiciously so.

ardy42• 7 years ago

Conspiracy theory: what if they intentionally throw random garbage in there so you don't get paranoid?

That's not a paranoid conspiracy theory (and certainly not something that should be down-voted to oblivion). It's well documented that Target did that exact same thing to throw off its customers, so they wouldn't be weirded-out by its pregnancy-prediction algorithm.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...:

“Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

jandrewrogers• 7 years ago

That's not a conspiracy theory, chaffing to obscure intent and capability is a real thing.

visarga• 7 years ago

Conspiracy theory: what if they intentionally throw random garbage in there so you don't get paranoid?

No, it's more like random exploration in the multi-armed bandit algorithm. Randomness is used from time to time to detect categories they might have missed out. If you don't take a risk, you don't win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

lithos• 7 years ago

Then if your worst paranoid nightmare does come true, you'll be rounded up with whatever random group is getting sent to the camps.

On a more realistic side you'll just identify yourself as technically savy. And be targeted on that.

cirgue• 7 years ago

I do modeling for an advertising recommendation engine (not at Amazon). We do controls against both human-made rulesets and random, and we consistently outperform both by a big margin. However, click through rate is always really low, and a model that massively increases revenue still serves irrelevant content most of the time, and still seems random from the POV of the user. The point of ML in advertising recommendation is to guess better in aggregate, not get it right all the time.

b_tterc_p2• 7 years ago

What about human models plus baseline likeliness to click on any ad?

pdkl954• 7 years ago

the predictions being made with it aren’t terribly impressive

So what? They still have the data and can refine their methods tomorrow. Today their predictions might be low quality, but they can retry as many times as they want. The problem is not the predictions they are making today; it's the many predictions (or inferences) are able to keep making in the future.

political groups

Remember that some types of advertising is not targeted. Some political advertising or branding advertising is intended to reach "all voters"j or maybe a very broad category like "Everyone Californian of voting age". Branding campaigns don't care if you're interested in e.g. vacuum cleaners. They just want you to think of their name first every time you happen to think of or hear about vacuum cleaners.

edit: (Multiple contradicting groups could be pushing ads at your (very general) demographic.)

science....or dogs

Many scientists like dogs?

Amazon thinks that my interests

No, they think that showing you textbooks and vacuum cleaners has a greater chance of increasing their revenue, according to various statistical models. Targeted advertising isn't about targeting what your are interested in. It's about letting other people target your with what they think they can sell you.

edit2: Of course, it could also be a terrible model trying to use data in stupid ways. I'm just suggesting that there are many plausible explanations.

mattkrause3• 7 years ago

Sure; It's obviously a mix of clever and stupid.

One of the more memorable political groups was the Sandinistas. I have never been to Nicaragua, so....limited relevance. I actually just looked (increasing my likelihood to be targeted again?), and was surprised to learn that they're still around; I had no idea they out-lasted Iran-Contra.

As for Amazon, I agree that P(bought a vacuum) is a good signal for P(will eventually buy another vacuum). Still, if they have this detailed psychographic model of me, you'd think they could do slightly better than what is essentially a zeroth-order prediction.

brudgers• 7 years ago

Low cost drives ordinary predictions. The average prediction is probably a few milliseconds of in memory operations at best. No network calls. Certainly no IO's to disk. Even with more work, you're targeted because you're among the best matches within your zipcode. The best results does not imply good results. Ordinarily ads reflect what an advertiser specified not what the platform thinks is most likely to be successfully sold to you.

mlthoughts2018• 7 years ago

There’s a distinction between what these companies can predict about you vs what they can roll up into products that other entities want to pay for.

For example, a ton of advertisers will predetermine some targeting criteria based on simple demographics, brand loyalty or rewards program data, etc. and then commit to it for a whole ad campaign, even if it means leaving money on the table by not electing to dynamically shift into more precise targeting.

For these clients, no amount of fancy predictive capability or algorithmic targeting will matter, they just don’t care. So Facebook or whomever just offers them big, sloppy and easy-to-conceptualize segments or buckets of users. They just want aggregate intelligence anyway, so nobody in the transaction cares much if it’s wrong about your age bracket or general TV interests.

This doesn’t mean Facebook is unable to produce far more alarming forecasts of your behavior, or assign you to categories based on things like political activism, privacy conscientiousness, or detect personal life details like your location trail, purchases, etc.

The really scary stuff just doesn’t end up being surfaced in connection to lowest common denominator adtech products.

deogeo• 7 years ago

What if the data is used to find whistleblowers? Or predict them? I'm sure there's plenty of corporations and governments that will be willing to pay for such services.

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/how-team-of-pre...

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

Something you should keep in mind is that companies like Amazon are all well aware of the anecdote about Target and teenage pregnancies. And the lesson they learned from that story is they should conceal from the user the full extent of what they know about that user, to avoid creeping people out.

If you receive 10 product recommendations, perhaps only one of them is actually targeted with a very high degree of confidence and the other 9 are basically noise added to deliberately deceive you, to lead you to believe Amazon knows less about you than they really do.

sct202• 7 years ago

Layer in the fact that on Facebook--and other ad platforms--advertisers can import lists of people by name/contact info to target specifically using data from brokers, it gets creepier. I'm less bothered by a algorithm that tracks me and serves ads as long as I'm aggregated in the result tracking, but when they're tracking/analyzing me as a specific person is super creepy.

Edit: If you check out your Facebook > Ad Preferences you can see which companies have added you specifically to their ads by email/phone number. My list has a ton of car dealerships and real estate brokers.

buboard5• 7 years ago

Question if google asks you explicitly if you are OK with using such info would that be OK with most people?

johnchristopher• 7 years ago

They don't because it doesn't provide them any value in their day-to-day lives.

nkkollaw• 7 years ago

I'm curious, who do data brokers sell this data to, and how is it eventually used?

For instance, if they know where I live and who my family is, do real estate companies buy data of people that died recently to contact my family and get a deal on my house?

lettergram• 7 years ago

I wrote about this relatively recently, basically there’s now enough data and enough good systems out there that companies can start predicting what you’ll do next.

This has been a thing since credit scores. However, now it’s to the point they can even mimick your voice and predict how you’ll respond to situations.

We are walking dangerously and blindly into a nightmare right now, and no one seems to realize it.

echevil2• 7 years ago

Seems like it. I tend to watch specific type of videos at specific time of day on YouTube. Even though I watch tons of other videos on the same account, YouTube can do a pretty good prediction at that time of day and present me the videos I'm going to watch. I find it so useful!

Brahma111• 7 years ago

Have mentioned it before. Watch any recent videos of Yuval Noah Harari and he almost always talks about the concept of 'The Hackable Human'. Forget about what data they have. Soon they will know more about you than you do. It has far reaching effect but let's hope humans find a way to keep outsmarting technology.

pdkl954• 7 years ago

General interest data | .... political leanings, magazine and catalog subscriptions .... preferred {celebrities,movie genres,music genres} ... {Bible,New Age/organic} lifestyle ...

If they wanted to get people's attention, this list should have included "preferred pornography" and maybe even "the other type of pornography that is viewed when your spouse's cell phone and your cell phone are in different zip codes.

crispyambulance• 7 years ago

The thing that makes me increasingly concerned is the possibility of an entity using this data-surveillance NOT so they can sell us more crap, but for ulterior malicious purposes.

We already got a taste of what this can mean with cambridge analytica.

But what if some hate group (or other extremist org) with deep pockets decided to buy up and use such data in more sinister ways, targeting individuals or organizations at large scale, developing "Stasi style" dossiers to use as leverage for future actions?

The information would not need to be "perfect" but it could get increasingly more accurate over time depending on how much attention they focus on their targets.

bilbo0s2• 7 years ago

Just imagine if it's just some tech guy, maybe unemployed or something, tired of being broke, who just needs to pay rent or something? That's what's concerning, people don't even need to have a cause, they can just be desperate. The government will be tracking the people who have a cause. You can go to the government to get help against those people because those people have something to lose. What about the people with nothing to lose? More and more people are out of work or underemployed, but I'm pretty sure the number of people who need to pay their bills remains constant.

All of a sudden all this data starts to make well off people look more like meal tickets. Imagine how easy it would be to get money out of that rich looking lawyer guy who's having an affair? Or maybe the well off looking doctor lady who voiced some views about blacks that her hospital, and the local naacp, might find interesting?

This economy, combined with massive data retention and security breaches, will make for some real perverse incentives in the future. We could conceivably get to the point where all you'd need to be is some guy with internet access who needs to pay rent by the end of the month.

wholinator2• 7 years ago

Right, and what if you can also fabricate the evidence used for the blackmail. Image generation techniques are improving year over year and we've gotten to the point where generating a video of a person saying anything you want in their voice with their face is coming closer to the realm of home computing power. Anyone with the time could focus on hacking social media accounts or even just faking a sceenshot. The media doesn't need much inclination or evidence to start the slander.

dontbenebby2• 7 years ago

The thing that makes me increasingly concerned is the possibility of an entity using this data-surveillance NOT so they can sell us more crap, but for ulterior malicious purposes.

Like causing a measles outbreak?

https://www.oregonlive.com/clark-county/2019/02/measles-outb...

rixrax2• 7 years ago

If you haven’t seen Lives of Others[0], you probably should. Talks pretty directly to what parent is proposing.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others

theNJR2• 7 years ago

Funny how the brain works.

People do realize something is happening. It’s why so many think Facebook is “listening” to their conversations then showing ads for “products I’ve never searched for then talked to about with a friend”. No, FB inferred you would buy it because your friend just did.

It’s hard to comprehend the effects of data collection. Which, of course, makes it even more powerful.

drdeadringer• 7 years ago

Just yesterday I read a post on Reddit where the OP was wondering about an online ad being mere coincidence or some deep data-collection plot.

Per the story: They had purchased ice cream at the grocery store using a credit card "never used for online purchases", and then at home they see an online ad for that very brand//flavor of ice cream. This raised alarm bells, hence the post to sanity-check.

Sometimes it's like we shouldn't fear the Terminator but the access terminal in our pocket. Other times it seems like both, or neither.

mindslight• 7 years ago

That isn't an "access terminal" in your pocket, but a fully-fledged computer and sensor platform operated by hostile actors.

The ice cream is straightforwardly due to the full purchase data being backhauled to the surveillance companies. The real wtf here is assuming that a card not being "used on the Internet" affects anything. People want to cling to this really weird "if I don't see it, it can't be happening model", as opposed to realizing that the surveillance industry is based around operating without your involvement or consent.

cc4392• 7 years ago

How would FB know what my friends have purchased? I've experienced the "ad that's way too specific to a conversation held just moments ago to be mere coincidence" phenomenon several times. Each incident has involved the kind of product neither of us owned, none of our other friends would ever buy, and dull/boring enough that no one would have a reason to post/chat about it on Facebook.

theNJR2• 7 years ago

Why were you talking about this terrible sounding product?

You're part of a cohort that the brand thinks would buy it. Or at least talk about.

specialist• 7 years ago

Everything about every person, living or dead, is known in near real-time.

Seisent (bought by LexisNexus) was being used to solve cold cases in the mid naughts. Just by using fragmentary data and sifting thru millions of demographic profiles to see who matched.

[FWIW, that "What data brokers know" table is pretty good.]

If we choose to protect people's privacy, give individuals control over what is publicly known about them, we'll need to encrypt demographic data at rest.

Meaning translucent database strategies. Just like how password files are salted and then encrypted. You need your pass

Meaning using universal identifiers. Like implementing Real ID.

It is counter intuitive that identifying (catalog) everyone is how we protect everyone. But if there's another way, I haven't heard of it.

There will be some upsides to finally having one master identifiers.

Data quality will dramatically improve.

Truly portable health records.

Nearly 100% accurate voter registration (& eligibility).

The government "census" will be just running a report.

We'll daylight all the bad data broking actors.

lioeters• 7 years ago

Setting aside the ethical/political implications of a universal identifier for everyone, your description makes me wonder about the technical implementation of the ID itself.

My first thought was whether it's possible to design the syntax of the IDs, so that they're not just sequential or random, but have some inherent properties that make them easier to organize, i.e., for sorting/categorizing. Kind of like Open Location Code [0], but for people. Since they should be immutable (same ID for lifetime), I suppose it could encode birth date/location, or maybe genetic "markers".. (Edit: On the other hand, that would by itself be a leak of private data..)

Once that's globally practiced (easier said than done!), there could be a searchable database of all registered individuals on the planet. I could see the practical advantages of having such a system, but it sure does have a hint of dystopian future.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Location_Code

rixrax2• 7 years ago

I’m increasingly thinking that targeted ads are eerily similar to Isaac Asimov psychohistory[0]. E.g. you cannot reliably predict individual behavior, but with right|enough data you can reliably predict how a large enough population will act.

This is why individually we often feel that they’re off the mark, or we’re thrifty enough to ignore the ads or political or other targeting. But like others have pointed out, data is out there, and ‘they’ have infinite tries to get it right. And more importantly, it works already today. And it’s impacting everyone, so as an individuals, we also get impacted in indirect and subtle ways when e.g. friend of ours raves about new toy she bought without even realizing that she chose this product over the other because of all the ads that she never clicked.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)

hari_seldon_• 7 years ago

Great analogy.

FlowNote• 7 years ago

If data collection can be sifted to discover behavior of groups...

And groups of people can have that behavior correlated to cultural and ethnic and racial factors...

Then, technically, isn't all of Silicon Valley violating the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s? For example, let's say black males statistically swipe phones a certain length and certain time... doesn't this mean ads targeting them can be engaging in disparate impact?

fucking_tragedy• 7 years ago

Then, technically, isn't all of Silicon Valley violating the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s? For example, let's say black males statistically swipe phones a certain length and certain time... doesn't this mean ads targeting them can be engaging in disparate impact?

Yes, and lawyers have had, and will continue to have, a field day in every instance that they can prove this is true.

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

Maybe. If such a swipe gesture discrepancy existed, ML could pick up on it as a proxy for race, despite having no concept of race and despite no human directing it to do so. One example I've heard of is lending software learning to use zip codes as a proxy for race, then systematically denying loans to minorities.

Much more egregious than this though is for years facebook was apparently allowing realtors to target only certain ethnicities. This was a case of deliberate human-driven discrimination, and as far as I know nobody has been held accountable for it. So far the tech industry has proven itself pretty good at getting around the law.

roganp• 7 years ago

I think the primary problem is glossed over a bit in the article. Even though most people are unaware of the kinds of information gathered about them, 36% are "Somewhat comfortable" or "Very comfortable" with the kinds of profiles being built. This seems (to me) a depressingly high number, one that indicates that there will be no grassroots rebellion against the surveillance economy.

trumped• 7 years ago

thats one reason why most people dont care about privacy

Most Americans don’t realize what companies can predict from their data

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