8 ms·
A possible explanation for the sudden change in mindset: Until recently, data was considered "the new oil." Those who sit on vast amounts of it were considere
by cs702 9y ago
A possible explanation for the sudden change in mindset:
Until recently, data was considered "the new oil." Those who sit on vast amounts of it were considered rich.
Now, after the Equifax hack, the FaceBook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, and other revelations (such as Grindr freely sharing highly personal data), it seems that data is increasingly being viewed as "the new uranium."
Data, it seems, is becoming radioactive and must be carefully controlled and safeguarded to prevent leaks. Those who sit on vast amounts of it must now handle it with care to avoid societal, political, regulatory, and legal backlash.
The stock market seems to be reflecting data's transition from asset to liability.
- matte_black 9y agoThe problem isn't the data. The problem is people who think bad things will happen to them if any of their precious data is ever leaked.
- wlesieutre 9y agoLike if Grindr sells your HIV+ status and then instead of hiring you an employer picks the other candidate because they know you'd raise the group health insurance rates? Let's not pretend that there's no way to misapply this data and that a lot of people won't be incentivized to do so.
- matte_black 9y agoRegulation exists to prevent this kind of thing. Your example perfectly illustrates the power of data, and the potential for revenue, negative and positive.
- icebraining 9y agoAnd part of those regulations are the ones that prevent data from being captured (and subsequently leaked) willy-nilly.
- Clubber 9y agoPost your credit card information on here.
- otoburb 9y agoThe analogy can be taken further: like uranium, data can be and has been weaponized in a narrow sense, and despite the toxicity and trouble still remains incredibly valuable.
- thriftwy 9y agoUranium isn't very valuable. It's around $20/lb. That unless you enrich it to the point that you will be considered a rogue actor if you're not a member of The Club already.
- kristianc 9y agoTo Facebook, you're only worth around $1.50. [1] [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-are-you-worth-to-facebook#img-2 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/how-much-...
- thriftwy 9y agoI don't. I'm not on it.
- kasey_junk 9y agoYou hope...
- mjevans 9y agoI don't and have never opened a Facebook account... but I've very little doubt that Facebook knows me as a 'shadow profile' reported by the friends and family that have tagged me without my permission in many photos. THAT should be something that an individual can sue Facebook over.
- aylmao 9y agoThat's besides the point of the original comment though. I'd assume even if they know stuff about you they can't make money off of you since you're not watching ads.
- reificator 9y agoBruce Schneier has been singing that tune for awhile now. Glad people are finally listening. https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic_asse.html https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...
- sixdimensional 9y agoWhat's sad to me about this is, data has in a sense been weaponized. Much like nuclear power, it has potential for both good and bad. I'm so saddened to see that so many organizations have collected and overstepped their boundaries without justification. There continues to be so much good, totally legitimate work to be done with data.
- jgamman 9y agomy assumption is that anything new is weaponised _first_ and then slowly over time diffuses out into the world and is nett positive (it's like society figures out how to take the spikey edges off) but you definitely don't want to be in the leading edge of the transition...
- denom 9y agoIt’s still possible to completely blow up the world with nuclear weapons.
- reificator 9y agoAnd you think it's not with information?
- dleslie 9y agoInformation has been a weapon since the dawn of man.
- k_sh 9y agoRight, but much in the same way that muskets and nuclear warheads are weapons... technology has changed the calculus on how powerful the weapons we have are.
- panarky 9y agoPersonal information should be viewed as toxic waste. If you can avoid it, don't collect it. If you must collect it, destroy it as soon as possible. If you must keep it, prepare to fork out for the best security and insurance against breaches. And never, ever, share it.
- w_t_payne 9y agoLovely analogy. Like so much other information, it sits on both sides of the balance sheet: Both an asset (if used correctly) and a liability (if collected and kept carelessly).
- sp527 9y agoMuch as I'd like to believe otherwise, I don't think this genie is going back in the bottle. Ever. There's too much money involved and our systems of governance are too fundamentally corrupt and unreliable to permit that.
- munificent 9y agoI'm not a fan of "big government" in principle, but one of the things I've been feeling lately is that it's pretty clear we need something big enough to push against increasingly giant mega-corporations, something whose primary goal is the welfare of the populace, and not some profit motive.
- eikenberry 9y agoCounter to that would be to make things smaller again. Eliminate the corporation as a long term legal entity. Revert it back to what it was, a risk mitigation/investment technique for specific, short lived ventures.
- intended 9y agoThis will never work. Look, corporation etc. etc. are just tools for humanity to deal with complexity. To break it down into parts which we can manage. IF we had larger brains we would have bigger corporations. If we were a hive intelligence, we would have different configurations of corporations. But we would always create a tool to expand into complexity for the efficiency gains or productivity gains we get. In short - EVERY tool made that gives an advantage moves the system onto the next level of complexity till we fail. If you have small corporations, then they will band together to become quasi corporations.
- Clubber 9y agoGovernment, for the most part, seems to actively promote giant mega-corps, particularly with all the mergers they've allowed happen over the last 30 years. Company: "Merging this and that will benefit the customer." USGov: "Ok, good enough for me!"
- 9y ago
- jedberg 9y agoThere was a good quote in the Cloudflare post yesterday about 1.1.1.1, that said something to the effect of "we don't want to store any personal data, because it's a liability, not an asset".
- mtgx 9y agoThe sooner companies understand that data is a liability (hopefully with some "help" from governments - GDPR is a decent step in that direction) the sooner they will start implementing a "least data collection" principle and adopt end-to-end encryption for as many of their services as possible.
- phamilton 9y agoI've never heard it expressed this way, but GDPR is essentially a tax on collecting data. Not in a revenue generating way, but definitely in a "discouraging behavior" way. It increases costs for companies to collect and store user data.
- rdlecler1 9y agoIt’s ridiculous that a one person startup with no revenue has to spend time dealing with GDPR regulations. This should have been structured to deal with the kinds of entities that lead to the law being written in the first place. This is only going to tax small startups and stifle innovation, giving an even bigger moat to the large incumbents. The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
- efosmark 9y agoThat's a great comparison, and is a concept bolstered by the coming GDPR rules in the EU.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoFB's leak was tied to Trump, whose election has many, many people outraged. That's the only reason why the media at large cares about FB's data leak right now. That's especially not something to trade over today since the leaky API was fixed in 2014 or something. Considering all of the leaks/breaches that happen, FB is an outlier and not indicative unless something changes with regulations and the law.
- swalsh 9y agoI'd agree that the outrage is fueled by the election, but I don't think that diminishes the significance of the shift. I think it was the force that was required. Previously, the trade of "all your personal information" in exchange for finding out which harry potter character you were most like seemed reasonable to people. They didn't see the value in their data, and they trusted random 3rd parties with it. Now people are seeing it. It's like one of those 3d pictures. The "hidden" image was always there in plain sight. People just overlooked it until they stared at it hard enough.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoUntil FB faces real penalties or suddenly every company starts doing security correctly, there isn't a shift. Just congressional testimonies and FB trying to save itself, which is basically how every other breach usually goes. It's how Equifax went and before FB, that was the breach to do something about because of their position within the banking sector.
- darepublic 9y agoEquifax is worse because it is a true monopoly. Cannot rent a condo buy a house do anything without dealing with those government backed extortionists. Whatever nyt or the left want to say you can absolutely live without fb, using it is a choice
- joejerryronnie 9y agoYou're being downvoted because this is not the narrative the typical HNer wants to believe - but you are absolutely correct. And the public somehow realizing the inherent perils of collecting personal data is not why the stock market has been on a downward trend. It's trade war fears, professionals taking profits, and panicky concerns that we've reached the top of the market or peak of the economic cycle and the inevitable downturn is now upon us.
- swalsh 9y agoThis is going to be an interesting shift, and I think a lot of startups are going to grow legs because of this.
- gflarity 9y agoIt's an interesting point but it's worth remembering that Uranium is far more valuable than oil by weight. Many people wouldn't mind sitting on vast amounts of Uranium. Also, keep in the various oil disasters. Dealing in oil also comes with it's own risks. No need to switch from that analogy. In this light, likening data to radioactive materials seems to me like spreading fud...
- Clubber 9y agoI think you were reading too much into the analogy.
- jobigoud 9y agoOnce there is a leak it's very hard to contain. It's going to travel across the globe in clouds. Its half-life is very long, even decades after you can still find traces amount of it in the (under)ground.
- 21 9y agoI think that would be amazing if true. Nothing will focus the mind of Facebook more than a declining stock price (and personal fortunes). Until today you could leak users data and nothing would happen to the stock price.
- datahaunt2 9y agoIf anyone would like an elaboration of this metaphor, I highly recommend these slides from Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard: http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm One important takeaway here is that if you think the "worries over tech firms" and their data are bad now, just wait until there's a Three Mile Island or Chernobyl level incident with all their data, like millions of identifable browsing records or grindr logs being dumped on an onion site somewhere.
- majewsky 9y agoI picture Maciej reading this thread while drinking a nice hot cup of "I told you so".
- psyc 9y agoA client of mine was pulling his hair out the other day over GDPR compliance and its demands on his small business. The business doesn't actually depend on customer data at all; they just... have some of it, I guess. Sure sounds like a liability to me.
- pkaye 9y agoIf that data is not important to the business then delete it.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoI've sat in several meetings where leadership folks are looking for a data warehouse strategy and plan. The topic of importance for data almost never came up. It was "store now no questions asked, mine value later". This was in line to other buzzword sentiments like "data is the new oil" (people believe it, seriously).
- closeparen 9y agoFacebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford. Data is incidental to that scandal. Equifax suffered no meaningful consequences for its breach. I understand that the HN consensus desperately wants your statement to be true, but that doesn’t make it so.
- aylmao 9y ago> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford. Data is incidental to that scandal. Would you care to elaborate? I'm curious and not entirely sure what you mean by this, sorry. > Equifax suffered no meaningful consequences for its breach. I don't think OP is claiming they did, but rather that it was part of the evolution towards thinking of data as a liability rather than an asset.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kk58 9y agoIm amazed how sheryl sandberg hasnt been called out. Wasn't she supposed to be adult in the room
- perseusprime11 9y agoNo! She is the one who is teaching Mark to play seasoned politics and not come to the townhall.
- eganist 9y ago> Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a price that previously non-mainstream actors could afford. Since there appears to be some confusion (it took me a few passes as well), I interpreted your statement as the following: > Facebook is in trouble because it sold political influence at a discount from what previously only large nation-state actors could afford. The implication, if I'm reading correctly, is that any mom-and-pop millionaire could practically launch the same sort of campaign on the platform. Or perhaps more succinctly and dramatically, Facebook commoditized the weaponization of data. Am I understanding correctly?
- zitterbewegung 9y agoI think this blog post is relevant . https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_toxic.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_tox...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- erikpukinskis 9y agoOr, data is so slippery you don’t need to own it, you can just sip leaks.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago> The stock market seems to be reflecting data's transition from asset to liability. I always thought this to be the key difference between the treatment of data in the USA and Europe. In Europe the culture of personal data protection is much more developed. In the USA it looks like citizens don't care and corporations abuse it to an absurd extent. You can witness this by using any service for the first time: an American start-up will immediately subscribe you to their mailing list without asking any questions - the relevant info is (probably) in their Terms and Conditions. In Europe, you are most likely presented with a separate box that even cant't be selected by default. In some countries you need to have separate boxes for different scenarios of personal data use. These regulations clearly favor the user and upset the marketing folks. People often criticize the EU for bureaucracy, but I'm not even sure the USA has an office responsible for cases like this one, someone who cares and can intervene on behalf of the citizens.