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Why on earth wouldn't you be horrified by a company creating a shadow profile of you?! Bizarre question. What possible good could ever come of it???

by uuuyno 8y ago

istorical 8y ago
Think about this. Any business that has a CRM solution (customer relationship management for anyone unfamiliar) like Salesforce for example has a database of prospective customers (who never opted in to create a profile) and as much information as they can collect or infer about you as they can. They want your name, your company, your title, your industry, your email, your phone number, your address or city or state. They want to segment you and identify which piece of spam (cough, I mean marketing) will appeal most to you based off your demographic or your pain points or your interests. They want to figure out which of their regional events they should invite you to based off where you live. They want to figure out if your company might be a good customer (based on criteria like company size, employee size, annual revenue, goods and services offered, etc) if they are B2B, or they want to figure out as much about you and your income, interests, and background if they are B2C and want to sell to you. These companies already have these systems, they try to collect as much about you as they can, and there's billions of dollars of investment and spending/revenue in these areas. You didn't sign up to have an account with them, but they will create one for you as soon as they are able if it helps them better sell to you. Any time you give your email to a website to sign up, any time you are asked for some personally identifying info at a retail business or swipe a card, a new "shadow profile" about you is created, or your existing "shadow profile" is updated. So really this practice has been going on for forever. Before CRM there were files and file cabinets. Do I support this practice? No. But if we think more openly about whether shadow profiles are a new invention we can quickly realize they are not.
- otakucode 8y ago
  The new thing is what can be done with the data. Rather than simply deciding how to market your service to the customer, you can use machine learning systems to conjecture the likelihood of that person being, say, a criminal, or an adulterer, or a political dissident. For each category of 'bad person' you can imagine, you can gin up some (almost completely nonsensical, but that doesn't matter) analysis profile and assign a probability score. You can then take the top couple of categories they score in and use that data however they please. For awhile I've wanted to take all publicly available data about politicians and train a machine learning system on it to predict which pols are cheating on their spouses or engaged in other sorts of elicit activities. I have zero confidence in the ability of such systems to predict human behavior, but that doesn't mean they can't be tremendously powerful tools of intimidation and manipulation. You'll notice after the Snowden leaks, each and every single statement the government ever made was extremely focused on the notion of human analysts reading the fulltext of peoples conversations. Not a mention was given to the automated systems profiling, categorizing, targetting, and producing "summaries" about people. Personally, those blind systems cobbled together by people with too few scruples ('just doing my job' is identical to 'just doing it for money' and those engineers deserve to have their faces spit in) and deployed by those with too much faith in oracular technology scare me far, far worse...
pharrington 8y ago
"Why on earth wouldn't you be horrified by a company creating a shadow profile of you?!" While we know the general class of such malicious activity is happening, the specific domain and scope is unknown to non-insiders. More importantly, the mammalian response actions to the emotion of horror are completely unsuited to the threat model in question. We need to be -completely rational- to have a decent chance of responding to this in a way that serves our general interest.
arcbyte 8y ago
Because why would I be? What possible good would ever come from demanding nobody know anything about me without asking me every single time? From having other people threaten me with weapons adn throw me into cages for DARING to remember something about other people or having a company that remembers things about its customers or potential customers, or offering information services. Sounds like a fascist nightmare.

Why on earth wouldn't you be horrified by a company creating a shadow profile of you?! Bizarre question. What possible good could ever come of it???

by uuuyno 8y ago

Why on earth wouldn't you be horrified by a company creating a shadow profile of you?! Bizarre question. What possible good could ever come of it???

istorical 8y ago

Think about this. Any business that has a CRM solution (customer relationship management for anyone unfamiliar) like Salesforce for example has a database of prospective customers (who never opted in to create a profile) and as much information as they can collect or infer about you as they can. They want your name, your company, your title, your industry, your email, your phone number, your address or city or state. They want to segment you and identify which piece of spam (cough, I mean marketing) will appeal most to you based off your demographic or your pain points or your interests. They want to figure out which of their regional events they should invite you to based off where you live. They want to figure out if your company might be a good customer (based on criteria like company size, employee size, annual revenue, goods and services offered, etc) if they are B2B, or they want to figure out as much about you and your income, interests, and background if they are B2C and want to sell to you. These companies already have these systems, they try to collect as much about you as they can, and there's billions of dollars of investment and spending/revenue in these areas. You didn't sign up to have an account with them, but they will create one for you as soon as they are able if it helps them better sell to you. Any time you give your email to a website to sign up, any time you are asked for some personally identifying info at a retail business or swipe a card, a new "shadow profile" about you is created, or your existing "shadow profile" is updated. So really this practice has been going on for forever. Before CRM there were files and file cabinets. Do I support this practice? No. But if we think more openly about whether shadow profiles are a new invention we can quickly realize they are not.

otakucode 8y ago
The new thing is what can be done with the data. Rather than simply deciding how to market your service to the customer, you can use machine learning systems to conjecture the likelihood of that person being, say, a criminal, or an adulterer, or a political dissident. For each category of 'bad person' you can imagine, you can gin up some (almost completely nonsensical, but that doesn't matter) analysis profile and assign a probability score. You can then take the top couple of categories they score in and use that data however they please. For awhile I've wanted to take all publicly available data about politicians and train a machine learning system on it to predict which pols are cheating on their spouses or engaged in other sorts of elicit activities. I have zero confidence in the ability of such systems to predict human behavior, but that doesn't mean they can't be tremendously powerful tools of intimidation and manipulation. You'll notice after the Snowden leaks, each and every single statement the government ever made was extremely focused on the notion of human analysts reading the fulltext of peoples conversations. Not a mention was given to the automated systems profiling, categorizing, targetting, and producing "summaries" about people. Personally, those blind systems cobbled together by people with too few scruples ('just doing my job' is identical to 'just doing it for money' and those engineers deserve to have their faces spit in) and deployed by those with too much faith in oracular technology scare me far, far worse...

pharrington 8y ago

"Why on earth wouldn't you be horrified by a company creating a shadow profile of you?!" While we know the general class of such malicious activity is happening, the specific domain and scope is unknown to non-insiders. More importantly, the mammalian response actions to the emotion of horror are completely unsuited to the threat model in question. We need to be -completely rational- to have a decent chance of responding to this in a way that serves our general interest.

arcbyte 8y ago

Because why would I be? What possible good would ever come from demanding nobody know anything about me without asking me every single time? From having other people threaten me with weapons adn throw me into cages for DARING to remember something about other people or having a company that remembers things about its customers or potential customers, or offering information services. Sounds like a fascist nightmare.