Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? (2016)

https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic_asse.html

by mooreds • 7 years ago

59 18 7 years ago

fredley• 7 years ago

This is an interesting post to see alongside There Is Too Much Stuff[1], which is also on the front page at time of writing. Many parallels between our collection and hoarding of junk, and our collection and hoarding of junk data.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/too-many-...

amelius• 7 years ago

Why are information brokers even allowed to exist?

The Wikipedia entry discusses some past attempts to apply regulation, but this all seems way too mild.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_broker#Criticism

brighter2morrow• 7 years ago

Powerful people like information brokers because their information can help track down dissidents

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

Unfortunately individual executives have historically not been made to adequately feel the pain when companies lose control of user data. Nothing will change until that changes.

AndrewStephens3• 7 years ago

Schneier is (as usual) right. It is far too easy (in fact, the default) to store every little detail about customers interacting with services you control. Only some of this data can be justified for business or technical reasons. The rest is dead weight and an actual liability.

A simple example relevant to readers here: every web server I know of logs information about each request and retains those logs for a long period of time (because, who cares? Disk space is cheap).

But those logs contain IP addresses and possibly other identifying information. Web servers get broken into all the time - if those logs get leaked people can use those logs to build profiles of your visitors and possibly correlate with other data sets to tease out information about specific visitors. On my website it would be easy to spot the admin IP address for further attacks.

Paranoid? Perhaps. During WWII the slogan was "Loose Lips Sink Ships" - any slip of information could be the final piece of data that gives the enemy a fatal advantage. We are effectively at war with criminals and actual foreign states (not to mention corporate interests) who are continually looking for similar advantages. Even random script kiddies want your data.

One of the things I like about the GDPR is that it force companies (and individuals) to recognize the danger and act accordingly.

A longer essay I wrote along the same lines[0]

[0] https://sheep.horse/2018/6/the_eu_general_data_protection_re...

jiveturkey3• 7 years ago

Schneier is (as usual) right.

It's easy to be right when you argue both sides!

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/01/security_brea...

AndrewStephens3• 7 years ago

Not sure what you are trying to say here.

The original article and the one you posted are not inconsistent - in your link Schneier quotes some research that the stock market doesn't care about data breaches, probably because there is little direct financial damage. Hence there is little incentive for companies to stop stockpiling every scrap of data.

Schneier is arguing that the risk to individuals and society at large is greater than any benefit this data could provide.

One way to remove the incentives to gather and store data is through regulation and fines - then the stockmarket would care.

paol• 7 years ago

This is very much in line with the logic of the GDPR legislation, which while not perfect is overall good.

It serves to reinforce the perspective that personal data is a liability, so the natural thing is to have as little of it as you actually need.

rrosen326• 7 years ago

There is a semi-valid reason similar, but I think different, from his first point.

Holding on to data provides an option to potential downstream gains. (ie: holding data has an "option value").

Will it be valuable? Who knows? Maybe there is some nugget which will unlock your business or service and bring you victory.

If you get rid of it, you'll never know, until perhaps too late.

If you couple the option-value of holding data to a perhaps unrealistically low expectation of the cost of holding data (ie: a breach), you get an expected value calculation that says, 'hold everything!'

It may be totally rational, even if incorrect.

Retra• 7 years ago

The rationality of hoarding makes more sense if you have 'warehousing' capabilities. Not so much if you're just piling things up haphazardly. (And those capabilities have costs associated with them.)

darkpuma2• 7 years ago

"The rationality of hoarding makes more sense if you have 'warehousing' capabilities"

Or if you believe you could/will organize the data in the future, perhaps with an unrealistic expectation that doing so will become cheaper in the future.

jdietrich• 7 years ago

Art. 5 GDPR:

Personal data shall be:

...collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes;

...adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed;

...kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed;

In the EU, Schneier's proposal isn't just a good idea - it's the law.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/

AnthonyMouse• 7 years ago

Now suppose your product is personalized search. You need every piece of data about someone, for as long as possible, so that you can do ML on it and personalize their search results. You could even argue that targeted advertising is part of the product in the same way that vendors pay grocers for shelf space and yet the cereal they were paid to put in front of you is a product you might actually choose (especially given that the contrary would imply they're wasting their money paying for placement).

And never mind search, personalized anything based on ML.

Which of those things does that violate? You can specify the thing ahead of time, anything that isn't statistically independent from the outcome is relevant but the only way to know that is to have the data to analyze it and that relation could change at any time, there is no natural time limit on how long the data remains useful for that purpose, etc.

My claim is not that that would necessarily be the outcome in an EU court. They're apparently quite against the idea in general -- prohibiting that sort of bulk data collection seems to be what everybody puts out as the justification of the rules. What I'm asking is, by what reasoning does that ostensibly undesired behavior actually violate those rules?

Meanwhile on the other hand, are we sure we actually want it gone? If ML-driven personalized medicine ultimately gets good enough to extend your life by a decade or make it so that you don't spend the second half of it bedridden, it would be worth quite a lot of cost to have that benefit.

It seems to me we're going about this whole thing wrong. The problem is not the data, it's the centralization. Having your own data is valuable, but it should be yours, on your device, not Facebook's. And then you knock out a major category of mass data breach because all the data doesn't actually exist in any one place.

Then if you want to share it with your doctor, you should be able to do that. But if your boss wants it, or the government without a warrant, it's still yours -- nobody gets to demand it, and Facebook can't provide it to Cambridge Analytica without your consent, because they don't have it. You do. And the "personalized news feeds" most people don't actually want isn't enough to convince you to give it to them.

But that's a completely different thing. It's more of a technical solution -- a different architecture that protects privacy intrinsically, rather than a set of rules that corporations can try to weasel out of with lawyers and lobbyists and jurisdiction shopping and trade wars.

PeterisP• 7 years ago

"By what reasoning does that ostensibly undesired behavior actually violate those rules?"

Under GDPR, it violates the principle of consent (the described scenario wouldn't meet the other ways that would allow you to use that data) - you're free to provide personalized search by collecting every piece of data about someone, for as long as possible, so that you can do ML on it and personalize their search results, as long as they freely give informed opt-in consent. Bulk collecting the data on everyone doesn't do that.

If you convince someone that they really want to allow you to collect all kinds of data (and they know what you're going to be collecting) because it'll allow them to receive better personalized service and they intentionally choose that this is what they desire, then that's okay. If not, then it's not okay.

If they're choosing not to give you that permission while knowing what it involves - well, that's their choice to make.

If they don't want to think or care about your offer and ignore it and don't opt in, then they obviously don't value the potential benefit enough to pay the price, so you can't collect and use their data. Tough luck.

jiveturkey3• 7 years ago

This article is pre-GDPR.

In January 2018, just 4 months prior to GDPR taking effect, Schneier argued, or at least endorsed evidence supporting, the opposite.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/01/security_brea...

This seems more consistent with my intuition. If personal data were in fact toxic, companies would in fact take pains to discard it.

We (HN crowd) like to think privacy matters, but there is ample evidence to the contrary. $FB as the examplar. https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/article...

Data Is a Toxic Asset, So Why Not Throw It Out? (2016)

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