14 ms·

Personalisation Is Asymmetric Psychological Warfare

316 points by edent 8y ago

maxxxxx 8y ago
We are on a path to some entities knowing almost everything about most citizens but these citizens know almost nothing about these entities. I think a good way would be to open up all data but whoever benefits from the current asymmetry will fight that tooth and nails. There won't be much profit in data everybody can get.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
  If the data is free the only actors that capitalize on it will be the people that automate the ETL on it and are constantly looking for new ways to apply it. The average consumer has very poor access to proper ETL.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Honestly, I think that's how life always is (this is the inner artist in me speaking). You can have all this data on the outside, and it still speaks nothing of the person on the inside. Companies can have every detail of your life parameterized and quantified, but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norms. Intentionally feed data that looks patterned, and then switch it up in a way that makes people scratch their heads and go 'huh'. You can walk around with your phone in your pocket and have that awareness, e.g. "I am purposefully taking this route on my walk to work while listening to this music on repeat for 30 days" because you know people are going to draw some correlation. You do 'know' things about those entities, namely, their brains are hooked on a drug called machine learning. That doesn't void you of your privacy.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    "There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face"
  - pixl97 8y ago
    >but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norms. Intentionally feed data And future algorithms will detect it. Not enough of the population will do it. At best you'll be classified as a deviant and you might have difficulty getting apartments or loans. At worst, well, maybe the first with their back against the wall when the corporate takeover comes.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      I'm not going to sacrifice my sanity and overall wellbeing for the purposes of the state. I don't live in China, I am not going to act like I have to protect myself like I live in China. Future algorithms won't detect it. The future population will do it without realizing that's what they are doing. That's what generational rebellion is all about. P.S. I'm already a deviant, and I'm fairly well accepted in my community that values diversity over discrimination, offers me everything I need to sustain myself independently, plan for retirement, etc. I managed to get all that, while being a deviant. It's counterproductive to worry about. I do my work, get the job done, I do a good job, end of story. Why overload the brain with fears when I have to use so much of it to reason correctly and create good code? Does that make me more predictable, more easily controllable, more financially viable, or less? Those are questions people who want to control other people can ask themselves.
    - throwaway37585 8y ago
      > At worst, well, maybe the first with their back against the wall when the corporate takeover comes. What are you talking about?
      - s-shellfish 8y ago
        I'm OP, not your parent commenter, but I do understand the perspective. This is something that is actually occurring, there really is a psychological war going between how much information black box entities have about entities they provide a 'service' for, in how it impacts the experience of living life, the fact that most people have no choice but be connected to the internet (the subject of the linked article). It's a psychological war in that it's an inverted microcosm of the history of discrimination. Instead of just judging people based on some generalized set of superficial details like appearance or a quantitative metric of intelligence, a GPA, resume, etc - a lot of organizations are refining it down to the most seemingly insignificant and 'supposed' trivial details. Which is missing the forest for the trees, even though it may be profitable in the short term. The US has a president that fancies himself a dictator and looks up to / highly respects people like Kim Jong-un and Uncle Xi. It's the cultural and political climate so it's clear there are real reality reasons to show cause for concern. All this stuff influences what people think is acceptable and where to draw the line. It's all background noise information that propagates into models of interpersonal boundaries - what people are willing to tolerate and what they will cry out against. Learned social behavior, etc. It supports fear culture and that is another tool people can use to manipulate and control others. Regardless of whether it actually works, this stuff is the mentality of some people in power. So when I read comments like the parent that replied to my original comment (I'm OP), the point is - guide them out of the conspiracy but understand where it's coming from by describing why it is true while not necessarily being true. Fear culture controls. People who want to control others for any purpose aside from improving the well-being and respecting the autonomy of others are aware of this. There are plenty of existing technologies (look back to the development of advertisements) that exist purely to manipulate emotional state in order to direct behavior, and I have no doubt there are some folks out there looking to refine it down to a precision science. The real front lines come down to, how far will they push it before people 'snap' (and you can see that happening with the US president, because honestly, every intent a 'self' attempts to have on others comes back to affect the individual 'self'). I think that explains his ludicrous behavior in a way that has empathy, because you can tell, all that garbage he has done to others continuously affects his perception on how he sees those around him. The man can't trust anyone except for dictators lately. I don't think there's going to be any kind of corporate takeover aside from corporate rebellion, possibly. Creating a tight association between the government, the media, and corporate interests is too last century. There are some interests that seem to be going in that direction, but it's clearly not all of them.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    " but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norm" You can play some little games but you won't be able to choose to not get rejected by different services based on that data. Just look at what happens to people on no-fly lists or who deal with identity theft. Easy to get onto and hard to get off. The more data these entities have and the more they can hide behind algorithms the more they can make your life miserable and you will have no idea where your problems are coming from.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      > The more data these entities have and the more they can hide behind algorithms the more they can make your life miserable and you will have no idea where your problems are coming from. I'm sure I sound overconfident but honestly, been there, done that. Having been suicidal for approximately half my life has transitioned into meaning, have no attachment to anything. Appreciate what exists while it's there, but don't be attached to it, don't depend on it for survival. Goods, services, liberties, freedom of expression, places, people. Life has been miserable enough for me while potentially having everything I could potentially get rejected from. If someone wants to make my life miserable, I pity them. Edit: I would not categorize identity theft under the same label as being put on a no-fly list. Identity theft can indirectly lead to being put on a no-fly list. Being put on a no-fly list should not lead to identity theft (assuming the entities that hold this information are as secure as they present themselves to be, given their stated purpose for their existence). From a data analysis perspective, that's a correlation to construct that could actually help people deal with the issues of too much data correlation being used to form expectations of behavior (like getting on and off lists that prevent essential liberties and rights from being exercised fairly).
- mathnmusic 8y ago
  We don't even have data about our own behaviour. Someone should build a self-hosted personal Google Analytics equivalent. RescueTime comes the closest, I think. There was https://connectordb.io/ https://connectordb.io/ but the project seems dormant now.
- petra 8y ago
  >> We are on a path to some entities knowing almost everything about most citizens but these citizens know almost nothing about these entities. I think Google is already there, at least for chrome users. >> I think a good way would be to open up all data Psychologically, this is a bad option. People need privacy, especially interpersonal privacy, which today, is generally, somewhat preserved. Of course, you could come with the claim that once everything is open, people will adjust, and things will be fine. But that's a huge and very risky experiment, and relatively hard to back-off from, once the data is released. And technically/legally it is possible to create more corporate privacy on the internet. It's just that there's no real political pressure to do so.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Finally are article that points out the real effects of corporate surveillance instead of making vague references to Black Mirrors: it's psychological warfare.
- o_____________o 8y ago
  > As the cabin crew serves you a drink "Dave! Can I get more peanuts? I know you're on your final warning from HR - and I'd hate for someone to put in another complaint." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
  - gowld 8y ago
    Wow, Black Mirror ripping off Community / Meow Meow Beenz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI4kiPaKfAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI4kiPaKfAE
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
bittercynic 8y ago
Knowing your favorite drink is obviously not on par with knowing that you're on thin ice with your HR department, and it is the corporation, not the flight crew, who has been (possibly) invasive. To me, it feels like a bit of a transgression whenever a business goes out of their way to find info about me without just asking. If you want to know something about me, just ask. I might refuse to answer, or ask why you want to know, but at least you haven't started off by disrespecting me. I'm not sure how so many businesses have become confused about this. Maybe they've calculated that pissing off a substantial number of their customers is a worthwhile trade-off, but it seems like a bad direction to go in even if the short-term numbers look positive. </rambly paranoia>
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  All the rewards and loyalty programs are keeping track of all your activity and is being made accessible to the staff that interacts with you. From a business perspective, an unknown person offers more risk than an known person so it makes financial sense to know who you're dealing with. In high margin, low volume businesses this was already in place, just with sales people keeping track. It just wasn't easily possible to do that for whole populations until recently such as retail, hotels, airlines, etc. I imagine soon many will start cataloging how many times a customer causes damage or makes a scene or is rude to staff, and if it gets logged with enough frequency, they get banned system wide. It'll be interesting to see how long "the customer is always right" stays in place once we have no choice but to deal with home Depot or Lowe's, or Walmart vs target vs Amazon, or one of the 4 or 5 airlines and hotel companies. Lenders and landlords have been doing it since forever, no reason for the other businesses to not get on board. All the troublemakers will be sifted through and left to deal with organizations outside of the mainstream.
- amelius 8y ago
  I agree with the customer's perspective of this. But there are businesses where personalization is key. For example, YouTube absolutely needs to know you in order to keep you watching addictive content. Without this, they would probably still not be profitable.
  - 8y ago
o_____________o 8y ago
This was a great premise, but the rapid escalation into dystopian absurdity was disappointing.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I didn’t see any dystopian or even mildly strange parts to it. Can you give more detail on which parts had some absurdity? All of the examples of how a customer could have creepily personal information about airline staff seemed like entirely realistic analogues of the type of personalization efforts companies make towards customers.
pjc50 8y ago
"Uncanny valley of sincerity" is the key thing here. I regularly go to the same cafe for lunch. So some of the staff know me by name, but others who've just started working there don't. And I know their faces and one or two names. This is how it works on a normal human scale. The corporate version of this delivers, as they say, asymmetrical friendliness. You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them. And especially in the airline context, all this is devoted to more perfect price discrimination. They know your favourite drinks order so they can sell you more drinks.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  Empirically however, it's an artificial distinction. You can see this in very high class concierge services, where they have deep dossiers on their clients, but a rotating staff of concierge's. Often there is a primary point of contact concierge that relay's the client's preferences to the others. Taking that same approach, especially when it comes to measurable behaviors (types of foods/drinks, media consumption etc...), why would it be any different mechanically other than the fact that you prefer familiarity with the person you are talking with?
  - haskellandchill 8y ago
    Empirically, interesting usage of the word. What exactly are you arguing for? We can be objective but we have access to a rich and beautiful subjectivity. It's interesting in all these "measurable" behaviors there is no room for measuring an individual's suffering, which is quite real, but it seems those making the decisions are far removed from it.
    - bluGill 8y ago
      I want personalization if done right. A co-worker went to try a new restaurant, and ordered his drink. The bar tender made his drink as ordered, and then realized that there was only one person in town who ordered that drink and what he wanted was slightly different from what was ordered. Because she knew what he wanted she remade the drink to be exactly what the customer wanted not what the waitress wrote down. (she delivered the drink personally just to verify that it really was the customer she thought it was and not a new guy who might have wanted it as ordered, which is how I heard the story)
motohagiography 8y ago
The inverse of all this surveillance is using CRM for everyday things. I can often tell when someone (recruiter, SaaS sales, dentist, etc) calls me because they have an alert in their CRM that the contact is cooling. Is it insincere? No, that's the depth of our relationship. So long as they aren't pretending to be zealously enthusiastic in that weirdly corporate, millennial zombie cheerleader way, I will deal with them. To me, for airline and other staff to address me by my first name is like being addressed as "Comrade," where only a counter-revolutionary could object to being addressed as a comrade, and would clearly require that I be marked as what I can only assume to be a problematic opportunity, and scheduled for enhanced scrutiny. The horses of dystopia have already left the barn, it's just a matter of how you choose to live out your remainder of it. "Ok?"
- clevergadget 8y ago
  I hate how on target this is
- gaius 8y ago
  We should bring back Comrade as the gender-neutral pronoun.
msp_yc 8y ago
Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists,—talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature; poetry,—O, they adore poetry,—and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor; they love liberty, “dear liberty!” they worship virtue, “dear virtue!” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one converted? The innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first difficulty; he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist or a phalanx of realists would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend your bad road with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, might be tried. Another cure would be to fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to suspect that something was wrong. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- tafycent 8y ago
  This still feel relevant today in explaining the push back against modern liberalism and social justice movements. Emerson was apparently not a fan of virtue signaling.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Personalization is very overrated. I remember reading a big NY Times piece on how their tech team uses an embedding-based personalization and recommender system, with a sexy blog post about their internal team that implements it, and I just recoiled in horror. For one, searching for content on NY Times site sucks. I just want a better search engine without personalization. Just better categories, tags, search by relevance to a named entity or narrowed in a time frame, which just works. Currently it’s an awful way to look for things. Couldn’t they spend engineering budget better on just search engine problems, rather than some sexy, over-hyped customer embedding model with all kinds of gadgets to solve cold start, etc., but which doesn’t seem to actually add value? The other thing is that you _know_ the whole purpose is to optimize some notion of engagement that is not actually a healthy measure of the user getting value out of the product. I think there could be some minimal benefit to stylizing or customizing results based on highly aggregated characteristics, like country or a super broad age group. But beyond ensuring the user is routed into a very high-level bucket of characteristics that can broadly determine relevance, anything more specific to individuals or anything relying on nearest neighbor or collaborative filtering based on a highly individualized representation, is just flat out unhealthy, by design. Information retrieval without personalization is like the new version of “I just want my phone to actually function as a phone.”
- kbyatnal 8y ago
  Here's the article: https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/on-the-path-to-personalization/ https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/on-the-path-to-per... Thought it was an interesting read.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Actually it looks like this is the one I was responding to: < https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/building-the-next-new-york-times-recommendation-engine/ https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/building-the-next-... >.
Verdex_3 8y ago
Here's a thought experiment. What if corporations hired a bunch of people whose job it was to be genuinely happy that it was your birthday. Maybe they divide their user group into days such that each day one of these employees would only be responsible for feeling happy about one or two users' birthdays. This employee would send you the email. And they would be happy about it and truly glad that it is your birthday. Is this situation more or less dystopian?
- maerF0x0 8y ago
  more. It's manipulative because they want something out of you. They want you to _feel_ closer to them than you truly are, so that you _feel_ something such that you bring them more business. Having your emotions manipulated such that you feel closer to your flight attendant means you may spend money on their airline like you're friends. But the truth will come out when the plane lands and you say "Hey, wanna go see a movie?" and they're horrified. The problem is that it's pretend w/ a cause. If it was just pretend and both were on board, it would be like children. If it was genuine, then all the better-- few things are better than genuine friendship.
- Kluny 8y ago
  More. The more companies make a fuss about birthdays, the more it takes the fun out of it. I no longer wish people a happy birthday on facebook because of the way facebook shoves it in my face all the time. There are like three people I say happy birthday to - facebook may remind me of them, but I call them on the telephone to say it. I use Jan 1, 1970 as my birthday any time a site asks me for it.
- clevergadget 8y ago
  This reminds me of the question - if you feel guilty for doing a terrible thing, is it somehow more forgivable? If it isn't, why are we so horrified when someone does a terrible thing and doesn't feel guilty later?
  - mmt 8y ago
    I'm not sure it's what you intended.. but here's my stab at what you're getting at. The key is that forgiveness is primarily about (and, arguably, for the benefit of) the emotional state of the one granting the forgiveness. It can be granted independent of any feelings of guilt (which are impossible to know for sure) on the part of the recipient. Similarly, someone else's happiness about my birthday is irrelevant to me if I don't care about that someone, no matter how genuine that happiness is.
darkhorn 8y ago
If you are in Istanbul and you want to use public transportaion with monthly subsrciption you need to buy Istanbul Pass with your ID, it has your name, picture etc. Because you provided your ID they know your birthday. Thus, on your birthdays when you step inside your bus and make your Istanbul Card read by the device (NFC) it says laudly "happy birdthday!". Because all kinds of public trasport use same card, like in ferries, metros, toilets, busses, trams you hear "happy birdthday!" all day in multiple locations. https://youtu.be/1mJJPID104s https://youtu.be/1mJJPID104s Oh, and you can see from their web sites where you have used your Istanbul Pass in the last few months, like "bus M42 Mecidiyeköy-Bakırköy, at 12:34 Today, -1 credit".
- ovao 8y ago
  That sounds kinda nice to me, actually. If I see someone going through a turnstile and their birthday is announced, I can shoot them a smile and a nice “hey, happy birthday”. Little things to invite positive personal interactions between strangers can be a good thing. That is, perhaps, not the intended purpose, but it at least seems like a welcome side effect.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
    A very unwelcome side effect of that would be that I don't get to control it. It's obviously unnecessary for the service to be performed, but they decide to "invite positive personal interactions" no matter whether I want any of that at that moment in that place.
always_good 8y ago
I've noticed over the last few years an arms race in welcome-emails trying to sound personal. Like when you receive this email 10ms after you submit the register form. > Hey Dan, was just tailing the access logs and happened to see you register. ;) Let me know personally if you have any questions! – Chuck, CEO It's even sadder when the templating system is broken and you see "Hey {{firstName}}". Please, spare us the bullshit.
- fauigerzigerk 8y ago
  OK, but what would you like to receive instead? Dear Madam/Sir Congratulations for becoming record #b6aeca9c-b249-4238-87ab-54c8adbf9762 in our customer database. Please be advised that becoming a customer does not make you profitable for us. To earn your place on our hard disk you have to spend at least £23.84 more with us this year or get at least three of your friends to sign up as well. Do not reply to this automated message as this email address is permanently unattended. We are a strictly no-support, no-human-touch enterprise as this is the only way to make this service sustainable. You don't want to ruin it for everyone else, do you?!? You have subscribed to our Unlimited Forever Plan. However, please be warned that we have a secret fair use policy in place to deter any free riders taking advantage of our generosity. Penalties and account closures may or may not apply according to our terms of use. Greetings Automated Customer Onboarding System
  - DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
    Yes please, that way I can start looking for a better provider, pay the money, or just ignore it. At the very least I’ll give you points for honesty, and might take that into account when making the decision about paying a bit more for a service that doesn’t treat me like a lab rat.
  - er0k 8y ago
    I would prefer it. At least it's honest.
  - megous 8y ago
    Send something actually useful like a link to "getting started" docs, link to your app, or something like that. Link to email settings management page. Bullet lists instead of long form content. You probably don't have "Hello, visitor..." on your web, so you can just as well drop it from your e-mail.
eevilspock 8y ago
far worse asymmetry: The Government can spy on citizens, but citizens can't spy on their government. This is precisely backwards of a free society. The Snowden episode both comically and tragically exemplifies this: He is an outlaw for giving the citizens visibility into the government's surveillance of those citizens. National security justifies government secrecy? I believe the opposite. Government secrecy jeopardizes the security of a free nation, turning it into an unfree one. It protects and enables corruption and hypocrisy. And it is used FAR more often in government acts the violate the principles of freedom, fairness and justice.
- eevilspock 8y ago
  The common argument against privacy, that "If you have nothing to hide you have no need for privacy", while fallacious when applied to citizens is spot on when applied to government (the entity with all the power). The government should have nearly nothing to hide if it is doing nothing wrong. Most of the justified cases are far outweighed by the dangers of the unjustified ones. It's not worth the trade. The only secrets that should be allowed are those that protect regular citizens, not the government or any of its agents.
- hsienmaneja 8y ago
  He’s an outlaw for having stolen highly sensitive classified info much of which was unrelated to domestic surveillance. He doused gasoline and lit a match over a good portion of our secret military ops.
  - citrablue 8y ago
    I prefer to think the secret military ops (capabilities) were the gasoline; Snowden lit a match to illuminate the tank.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Just because the government deems something "highly sensitive classified info" doesn't mean it should be, especially not with the US's history. Not that there are better countries, but considering what the US has done in the recent past, it shouldn't be trusted.
chrstphrhrt 8y ago
Ever notice how bullies will always memorize these small personal details about a target and then when manipulating or gaslighting make sure to mention those facts? E.g. Oh a new crisis "just came up". I need you to complete this big menial data entry task that I forgot about for a week right now (drop whatever you were working on before). Don't you want to make it to your daughter's concert tonight? Best get it done by EOD so you can be there for her. Next day: how's progress on that thing you were working on before?
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
  It’s all about control, and intimacy as a route to control. A bully uses it to instill dread, a company uses it to influence behavior to make money, but the root is the same.
hellsOtherPeeps 8y ago
Facebook has somehow figured out that one of my profiles is directly tied to some of my credit card activity. I wasn't being entirely careful about locking things down. And now I get some extremely specific ads, relating to a 30 day rolling window of recent purchases. I'm trying to think of the best ways to poison and destroy this linkage, that was established some time after September. It may indeed be true that I just have to totally disconnect. On some level, this is regrettable, only because Facebook absolutely monopolizes access to the updates some people choose to publicize for themselves, since those people know no other way to broadcast important information. Mostly, these people are not geeks with technical fetishes. They don't have the slightest inkling about packets, ports, sockets, protocols. They don't understand that an iPhone does have a root file system. So facebook is it, and no distributed immitation cheese or diet margarine will replace their coca-cola brand social media. What to do?
- eevilspock 8y ago
  https://gitlab.com/upend/upend.org-content/blob/master/raison-d-etre.md https://gitlab.com/upend/upend.org-content/blob/master/raiso...
carapace 8y ago
Parity is one solution. "Total surveillance is the perfection of democracy." > The true horror of technological omniscience is that it shall force us for once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we shall have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. The new equilibrium will not involve tilting at the windmills of ubiquitous sensors and processing power but rather learning what explicit rules we can actually live by, finding, in effect, the real shape of human society. Parity of information is the difference between Star Trek and North Korea.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  Yep, like information on Omega where they not only restricted information from basically everyone but would resort to straight up thievery to ensure it could never be developed. Sounds like North Korea to me...
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  - carapace 8y ago
    Are you talking about tht one lousy Voyager episode? I hardly think that invalidates the ethos of the whole franchise? Maybe you prefer "The Orville"?
narvind 8y ago
Just to take away the creepiness factor, I'd say things like: Passengers who shared their favorite drinks with us rate us higher because we know them better and serve them accordingly. This is akin to amazon's main website changing "We recommend the following to you" to: "People who bought this also bought" - to induce a subtle hint of jealousy that others are getting a better deal and this is totally optional. Any recommendation system should be a voluntary opt-in feature and should consistently do a great job at recommending.
nitwit005 8y ago
This sort of thing always reminds me of Idiocracy: "Welcome to Costco i love you". Occasionally you run into a genuinely nice staff member at the supermarket who immediately learns your name, asks about your kids, etc. Companies notice how everyone is pleased with that, and then get the idea that they'll somehow force the behavior onto the rest of the staff. Everyone is forced to greet you, thank you by (poorly pronounced) name off credit card, and they send secret shoppers to penalize them if they fail to do these things. The end result of which ends up being negative, because no one particularly likes hearing friendly words that clearly aren't genuine.
everybodyknows 8y ago
Personal wellbeing hint: Do not ever joke about an airline pilot's recent alcohol intake, as the article suggests. This has been done, was treated as a genuine accusation, and precipitated cancellation of the flight. Don't fully recall consequences to the joker, but they weren't good, starting with being identified by seat number to fellow passengers.
- mirimir 8y ago
  That would, of course, be stupid. But given the capability to know such information, you'd also know the names and email addresses of all passengers. So just send a report on the pilot to them all. From a thoroughly anonymized and proxied account. Including yourself as a recipient.
- bronco21016 8y ago
  Unfortunately, the day and age of social media requires any accusations, joking or not, to be treated as real. How horrible would it be for an airline to allow the pilots to fly when someone suggested they may have been unfit to fly and the accusation was recorded with employees of the airline shown to be aware of the accusations. The lawsuits would be ridiculous. Don’t joke around about things in the airport or on an airplane. Safety and security are generally number one in the minds of the front line employees. Turns out we like going home alive too.
kazinator 8y ago
No flying experience will be correctly personalized to everyone's true preferences until we see attractive stewardesses sitting in a few laps. Until then, it's just a harmless sham.
cosmic_ape 8y ago
A bit different, but something similar does happen already, when people rate taxi drivers, cashiers in a store, or people commenting on airbnb hosts. These reactions often get personal rather than being based on an objective evaluation of a transaction. Point is, the "flight crew"s and even the "pilots" are not the corporation. The corporation may easily sacrifice their privacy if its believed to contribute the bottom line. Even the CEO might be sacrificed. The really private things about a corporation are its finances, its tradeoffs of customer benefit vs "efficiency", its market segmentation policies, etc.

316 points by edent 8y ago

We are on a path to some entities knowing almost everything about most citizens but these citizens know almost nothing about these entities. I think a good way would be to open up all data but whoever benefits from the current asymmetry will fight that tooth and nails. There won't be much profit in data everybody can get.

X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
If the data is free the only actors that capitalize on it will be the people that automate the ETL on it and are constantly looking for new ways to apply it. The average consumer has very poor access to proper ETL.
s-shellfish 8y ago
Honestly, I think that's how life always is (this is the inner artist in me speaking). You can have all this data on the outside, and it still speaks nothing of the person on the inside. Companies can have every detail of your life parameterized and quantified, but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norms. Intentionally feed data that looks patterned, and then switch it up in a way that makes people scratch their heads and go 'huh'. You can walk around with your phone in your pocket and have that awareness, e.g. "I am purposefully taking this route on my walk to work while listening to this music on repeat for 30 days" because you know people are going to draw some correlation. You do 'know' things about those entities, namely, their brains are hooked on a drug called machine learning. That doesn't void you of your privacy.
- pjc50 8y ago
  "There is no art to find the mind's construction in the face"
- pixl97 8y ago
  >but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norms. Intentionally feed data And future algorithms will detect it. Not enough of the population will do it. At best you'll be classified as a deviant and you might have difficulty getting apartments or loans. At worst, well, maybe the first with their back against the wall when the corporate takeover comes.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    I'm not going to sacrifice my sanity and overall wellbeing for the purposes of the state. I don't live in China, I am not going to act like I have to protect myself like I live in China. Future algorithms won't detect it. The future population will do it without realizing that's what they are doing. That's what generational rebellion is all about. P.S. I'm already a deviant, and I'm fairly well accepted in my community that values diversity over discrimination, offers me everything I need to sustain myself independently, plan for retirement, etc. I managed to get all that, while being a deviant. It's counterproductive to worry about. I do my work, get the job done, I do a good job, end of story. Why overload the brain with fears when I have to use so much of it to reason correctly and create good code? Does that make me more predictable, more easily controllable, more financially viable, or less? Those are questions people who want to control other people can ask themselves.
  - throwaway37585 8y ago
    > At worst, well, maybe the first with their back against the wall when the corporate takeover comes. What are you talking about?
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      I'm OP, not your parent commenter, but I do understand the perspective. This is something that is actually occurring, there really is a psychological war going between how much information black box entities have about entities they provide a 'service' for, in how it impacts the experience of living life, the fact that most people have no choice but be connected to the internet (the subject of the linked article). It's a psychological war in that it's an inverted microcosm of the history of discrimination. Instead of just judging people based on some generalized set of superficial details like appearance or a quantitative metric of intelligence, a GPA, resume, etc - a lot of organizations are refining it down to the most seemingly insignificant and 'supposed' trivial details. Which is missing the forest for the trees, even though it may be profitable in the short term. The US has a president that fancies himself a dictator and looks up to / highly respects people like Kim Jong-un and Uncle Xi. It's the cultural and political climate so it's clear there are real reality reasons to show cause for concern. All this stuff influences what people think is acceptable and where to draw the line. It's all background noise information that propagates into models of interpersonal boundaries - what people are willing to tolerate and what they will cry out against. Learned social behavior, etc. It supports fear culture and that is another tool people can use to manipulate and control others. Regardless of whether it actually works, this stuff is the mentality of some people in power. So when I read comments like the parent that replied to my original comment (I'm OP), the point is - guide them out of the conspiracy but understand where it's coming from by describing why it is true while not necessarily being true. Fear culture controls. People who want to control others for any purpose aside from improving the well-being and respecting the autonomy of others are aware of this. There are plenty of existing technologies (look back to the development of advertisements) that exist purely to manipulate emotional state in order to direct behavior, and I have no doubt there are some folks out there looking to refine it down to a precision science. The real front lines come down to, how far will they push it before people 'snap' (and you can see that happening with the US president, because honestly, every intent a 'self' attempts to have on others comes back to affect the individual 'self'). I think that explains his ludicrous behavior in a way that has empathy, because you can tell, all that garbage he has done to others continuously affects his perception on how he sees those around him. The man can't trust anyone except for dictators lately. I don't think there's going to be any kind of corporate takeover aside from corporate rebellion, possibly. Creating a tight association between the government, the media, and corporate interests is too last century. There are some interests that seem to be going in that direction, but it's clearly not all of them.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  " but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norm" You can play some little games but you won't be able to choose to not get rejected by different services based on that data. Just look at what happens to people on no-fly lists or who deal with identity theft. Easy to get onto and hard to get off. The more data these entities have and the more they can hide behind algorithms the more they can make your life miserable and you will have no idea where your problems are coming from.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    > The more data these entities have and the more they can hide behind algorithms the more they can make your life miserable and you will have no idea where your problems are coming from. I'm sure I sound overconfident but honestly, been there, done that. Having been suicidal for approximately half my life has transitioned into meaning, have no attachment to anything. Appreciate what exists while it's there, but don't be attached to it, don't depend on it for survival. Goods, services, liberties, freedom of expression, places, people. Life has been miserable enough for me while potentially having everything I could potentially get rejected from. If someone wants to make my life miserable, I pity them. Edit: I would not categorize identity theft under the same label as being put on a no-fly list. Identity theft can indirectly lead to being put on a no-fly list. Being put on a no-fly list should not lead to identity theft (assuming the entities that hold this information are as secure as they present themselves to be, given their stated purpose for their existence). From a data analysis perspective, that's a correlation to construct that could actually help people deal with the issues of too much data correlation being used to form expectations of behavior (like getting on and off lists that prevent essential liberties and rights from being exercised fairly).
mathnmusic 8y ago
We don't even have data about our own behaviour. Someone should build a self-hosted personal Google Analytics equivalent. RescueTime comes the closest, I think. There was https://connectordb.io/ https://connectordb.io/ but the project seems dormant now.
petra 8y ago
>> We are on a path to some entities knowing almost everything about most citizens but these citizens know almost nothing about these entities. I think Google is already there, at least for chrome users. >> I think a good way would be to open up all data Psychologically, this is a bad option. People need privacy, especially interpersonal privacy, which today, is generally, somewhat preserved. Of course, you could come with the claim that once everything is open, people will adjust, and things will be fine. But that's a huge and very risky experiment, and relatively hard to back-off from, once the data is released. And technically/legally it is possible to create more corporate privacy on the internet. It's just that there's no real political pressure to do so.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

Finally are article that points out the real effects of corporate surveillance instead of making vague references to Black Mirrors: it's psychological warfare.

o_____________o 8y ago
> As the cabin crew serves you a drink "Dave! Can I get more peanuts? I know you're on your final warning from HR - and I'd hate for someone to put in another complaint." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive
- gowld 8y ago
  Wow, Black Mirror ripping off Community / Meow Meow Beenz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI4kiPaKfAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CI4kiPaKfAE
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

bittercynic 8y ago

Knowing your favorite drink is obviously not on par with knowing that you're on thin ice with your HR department, and it is the corporation, not the flight crew, who has been (possibly) invasive. To me, it feels like a bit of a transgression whenever a business goes out of their way to find info about me without just asking. If you want to know something about me, just ask. I might refuse to answer, or ask why you want to know, but at least you haven't started off by disrespecting me. I'm not sure how so many businesses have become confused about this. Maybe they've calculated that pissing off a substantial number of their customers is a worthwhile trade-off, but it seems like a bad direction to go in even if the short-term numbers look positive. </rambly paranoia>

lotsofpulp 8y ago
All the rewards and loyalty programs are keeping track of all your activity and is being made accessible to the staff that interacts with you. From a business perspective, an unknown person offers more risk than an known person so it makes financial sense to know who you're dealing with. In high margin, low volume businesses this was already in place, just with sales people keeping track. It just wasn't easily possible to do that for whole populations until recently such as retail, hotels, airlines, etc. I imagine soon many will start cataloging how many times a customer causes damage or makes a scene or is rude to staff, and if it gets logged with enough frequency, they get banned system wide. It'll be interesting to see how long "the customer is always right" stays in place once we have no choice but to deal with home Depot or Lowe's, or Walmart vs target vs Amazon, or one of the 4 or 5 airlines and hotel companies. Lenders and landlords have been doing it since forever, no reason for the other businesses to not get on board. All the troublemakers will be sifted through and left to deal with organizations outside of the mainstream.
amelius 8y ago
I agree with the customer's perspective of this. But there are businesses where personalization is key. For example, YouTube absolutely needs to know you in order to keep you watching addictive content. Without this, they would probably still not be profitable.
- 8y ago

o_____________o 8y ago

This was a great premise, but the rapid escalation into dystopian absurdity was disappointing.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I didn’t see any dystopian or even mildly strange parts to it. Can you give more detail on which parts had some absurdity? All of the examples of how a customer could have creepily personal information about airline staff seemed like entirely realistic analogues of the type of personalization efforts companies make towards customers.

pjc50 8y ago

"Uncanny valley of sincerity" is the key thing here. I regularly go to the same cafe for lunch. So some of the staff know me by name, but others who've just started working there don't. And I know their faces and one or two names. This is how it works on a normal human scale. The corporate version of this delivers, as they say, asymmetrical friendliness. You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them. And especially in the airline context, all this is devoted to more perfect price discrimination. They know your favourite drinks order so they can sell you more drinks.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago
Empirically however, it's an artificial distinction. You can see this in very high class concierge services, where they have deep dossiers on their clients, but a rotating staff of concierge's. Often there is a primary point of contact concierge that relay's the client's preferences to the others. Taking that same approach, especially when it comes to measurable behaviors (types of foods/drinks, media consumption etc...), why would it be any different mechanically other than the fact that you prefer familiarity with the person you are talking with?
- haskellandchill 8y ago
  Empirically, interesting usage of the word. What exactly are you arguing for? We can be objective but we have access to a rich and beautiful subjectivity. It's interesting in all these "measurable" behaviors there is no room for measuring an individual's suffering, which is quite real, but it seems those making the decisions are far removed from it.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    I want personalization if done right. A co-worker went to try a new restaurant, and ordered his drink. The bar tender made his drink as ordered, and then realized that there was only one person in town who ordered that drink and what he wanted was slightly different from what was ordered. Because she knew what he wanted she remade the drink to be exactly what the customer wanted not what the waitress wrote down. (she delivered the drink personally just to verify that it really was the customer she thought it was and not a new guy who might have wanted it as ordered, which is how I heard the story)

motohagiography 8y ago

The inverse of all this surveillance is using CRM for everyday things. I can often tell when someone (recruiter, SaaS sales, dentist, etc) calls me because they have an alert in their CRM that the contact is cooling. Is it insincere? No, that's the depth of our relationship. So long as they aren't pretending to be zealously enthusiastic in that weirdly corporate, millennial zombie cheerleader way, I will deal with them. To me, for airline and other staff to address me by my first name is like being addressed as "Comrade," where only a counter-revolutionary could object to being addressed as a comrade, and would clearly require that I be marked as what I can only assume to be a problematic opportunity, and scheduled for enhanced scrutiny. The horses of dystopia have already left the barn, it's just a matter of how you choose to live out your remainder of it. "Ok?"

clevergadget 8y ago
I hate how on target this is
gaius 8y ago
We should bring back Comrade as the gender-neutral pronoun.

msp_yc 8y ago

Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists,—talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature; poetry,—O, they adore poetry,—and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor; they love liberty, “dear liberty!” they worship virtue, “dear virtue!” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one converted? The innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first difficulty; he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist or a phalanx of realists would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend your bad road with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, might be tried. Another cure would be to fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to suspect that something was wrong. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

tafycent 8y ago
This still feel relevant today in explaining the push back against modern liberalism and social justice movements. Emerson was apparently not a fan of virtue signaling.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Personalization is very overrated. I remember reading a big NY Times piece on how their tech team uses an embedding-based personalization and recommender system, with a sexy blog post about their internal team that implements it, and I just recoiled in horror. For one, searching for content on NY Times site sucks. I just want a better search engine without personalization. Just better categories, tags, search by relevance to a named entity or narrowed in a time frame, which just works. Currently it’s an awful way to look for things. Couldn’t they spend engineering budget better on just search engine problems, rather than some sexy, over-hyped customer embedding model with all kinds of gadgets to solve cold start, etc., but which doesn’t seem to actually add value? The other thing is that you _know_ the whole purpose is to optimize some notion of engagement that is not actually a healthy measure of the user getting value out of the product. I think there could be some minimal benefit to stylizing or customizing results based on highly aggregated characteristics, like country or a super broad age group. But beyond ensuring the user is routed into a very high-level bucket of characteristics that can broadly determine relevance, anything more specific to individuals or anything relying on nearest neighbor or collaborative filtering based on a highly individualized representation, is just flat out unhealthy, by design. Information retrieval without personalization is like the new version of “I just want my phone to actually function as a phone.”

kbyatnal 8y ago
Here's the article: https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/on-the-path-to-personalization/ https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/15/on-the-path-to-per... Thought it was an interesting read.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Actually it looks like this is the one I was responding to: < https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/building-the-next-new-york-times-recommendation-engine/ https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/building-the-next-... >.

Verdex_3 8y ago

Here's a thought experiment. What if corporations hired a bunch of people whose job it was to be genuinely happy that it was your birthday. Maybe they divide their user group into days such that each day one of these employees would only be responsible for feeling happy about one or two users' birthdays. This employee would send you the email. And they would be happy about it and truly glad that it is your birthday. Is this situation more or less dystopian?

maerF0x0 8y ago
more. It's manipulative because they want something out of you. They want you to _feel_ closer to them than you truly are, so that you _feel_ something such that you bring them more business. Having your emotions manipulated such that you feel closer to your flight attendant means you may spend money on their airline like you're friends. But the truth will come out when the plane lands and you say "Hey, wanna go see a movie?" and they're horrified. The problem is that it's pretend w/ a cause. If it was just pretend and both were on board, it would be like children. If it was genuine, then all the better-- few things are better than genuine friendship.
Kluny 8y ago
More. The more companies make a fuss about birthdays, the more it takes the fun out of it. I no longer wish people a happy birthday on facebook because of the way facebook shoves it in my face all the time. There are like three people I say happy birthday to - facebook may remind me of them, but I call them on the telephone to say it. I use Jan 1, 1970 as my birthday any time a site asks me for it.
clevergadget 8y ago
This reminds me of the question - if you feel guilty for doing a terrible thing, is it somehow more forgivable? If it isn't, why are we so horrified when someone does a terrible thing and doesn't feel guilty later?
- mmt 8y ago
  I'm not sure it's what you intended.. but here's my stab at what you're getting at. The key is that forgiveness is primarily about (and, arguably, for the benefit of) the emotional state of the one granting the forgiveness. It can be granted independent of any feelings of guilt (which are impossible to know for sure) on the part of the recipient. Similarly, someone else's happiness about my birthday is irrelevant to me if I don't care about that someone, no matter how genuine that happiness is.

darkhorn 8y ago

If you are in Istanbul and you want to use public transportaion with monthly subsrciption you need to buy Istanbul Pass with your ID, it has your name, picture etc. Because you provided your ID they know your birthday. Thus, on your birthdays when you step inside your bus and make your Istanbul Card read by the device (NFC) it says laudly "happy birdthday!". Because all kinds of public trasport use same card, like in ferries, metros, toilets, busses, trams you hear "happy birdthday!" all day in multiple locations. https://youtu.be/1mJJPID104s https://youtu.be/1mJJPID104s Oh, and you can see from their web sites where you have used your Istanbul Pass in the last few months, like "bus M42 Mecidiyeköy-Bakırköy, at 12:34 Today, -1 credit".

ovao 8y ago
That sounds kinda nice to me, actually. If I see someone going through a turnstile and their birthday is announced, I can shoot them a smile and a nice “hey, happy birthday”. Little things to invite positive personal interactions between strangers can be a good thing. That is, perhaps, not the intended purpose, but it at least seems like a welcome side effect.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y ago
  A very unwelcome side effect of that would be that I don't get to control it. It's obviously unnecessary for the service to be performed, but they decide to "invite positive personal interactions" no matter whether I want any of that at that moment in that place.

always_good 8y ago

I've noticed over the last few years an arms race in welcome-emails trying to sound personal. Like when you receive this email 10ms after you submit the register form. > Hey Dan, was just tailing the access logs and happened to see you register. ;) Let me know personally if you have any questions! – Chuck, CEO It's even sadder when the templating system is broken and you see "Hey {{firstName}}". Please, spare us the bullshit.

fauigerzigerk 8y ago
OK, but what would you like to receive instead? Dear Madam/Sir Congratulations for becoming record #b6aeca9c-b249-4238-87ab-54c8adbf9762 in our customer database. Please be advised that becoming a customer does not make you profitable for us. To earn your place on our hard disk you have to spend at least £23.84 more with us this year or get at least three of your friends to sign up as well. Do not reply to this automated message as this email address is permanently unattended. We are a strictly no-support, no-human-touch enterprise as this is the only way to make this service sustainable. You don't want to ruin it for everyone else, do you?!? You have subscribed to our Unlimited Forever Plan. However, please be warned that we have a secret fair use policy in place to deter any free riders taking advantage of our generosity. Penalties and account closures may or may not apply according to our terms of use. Greetings Automated Customer Onboarding System
- DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
  Yes please, that way I can start looking for a better provider, pay the money, or just ignore it. At the very least I’ll give you points for honesty, and might take that into account when making the decision about paying a bit more for a service that doesn’t treat me like a lab rat.
- er0k 8y ago
  I would prefer it. At least it's honest.
- megous 8y ago
  Send something actually useful like a link to "getting started" docs, link to your app, or something like that. Link to email settings management page. Bullet lists instead of long form content. You probably don't have "Hello, visitor..." on your web, so you can just as well drop it from your e-mail.

eevilspock 8y ago

far worse asymmetry: The Government can spy on citizens, but citizens can't spy on their government. This is precisely backwards of a free society. The Snowden episode both comically and tragically exemplifies this: He is an outlaw for giving the citizens visibility into the government's surveillance of those citizens. National security justifies government secrecy? I believe the opposite. Government secrecy jeopardizes the security of a free nation, turning it into an unfree one. It protects and enables corruption and hypocrisy. And it is used FAR more often in government acts the violate the principles of freedom, fairness and justice.

eevilspock 8y ago
The common argument against privacy, that "If you have nothing to hide you have no need for privacy", while fallacious when applied to citizens is spot on when applied to government (the entity with all the power). The government should have nearly nothing to hide if it is doing nothing wrong. Most of the justified cases are far outweighed by the dangers of the unjustified ones. It's not worth the trade. The only secrets that should be allowed are those that protect regular citizens, not the government or any of its agents.
hsienmaneja 8y ago
He’s an outlaw for having stolen highly sensitive classified info much of which was unrelated to domestic surveillance. He doused gasoline and lit a match over a good portion of our secret military ops.
- citrablue 8y ago
  I prefer to think the secret military ops (capabilities) were the gasoline; Snowden lit a match to illuminate the tank.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Just because the government deems something "highly sensitive classified info" doesn't mean it should be, especially not with the US's history. Not that there are better countries, but considering what the US has done in the recent past, it shouldn't be trusted.

chrstphrhrt 8y ago

Ever notice how bullies will always memorize these small personal details about a target and then when manipulating or gaslighting make sure to mention those facts? E.g. Oh a new crisis "just came up". I need you to complete this big menial data entry task that I forgot about for a week right now (drop whatever you were working on before). Don't you want to make it to your daughter's concert tonight? Best get it done by EOD so you can be there for her. Next day: how's progress on that thing you were working on before?

DmenshunlAnlsis 8y ago
It’s all about control, and intimacy as a route to control. A bully uses it to instill dread, a company uses it to influence behavior to make money, but the root is the same.

hellsOtherPeeps 8y ago

Facebook has somehow figured out that one of my profiles is directly tied to some of my credit card activity. I wasn't being entirely careful about locking things down. And now I get some extremely specific ads, relating to a 30 day rolling window of recent purchases. I'm trying to think of the best ways to poison and destroy this linkage, that was established some time after September. It may indeed be true that I just have to totally disconnect. On some level, this is regrettable, only because Facebook absolutely monopolizes access to the updates some people choose to publicize for themselves, since those people know no other way to broadcast important information. Mostly, these people are not geeks with technical fetishes. They don't have the slightest inkling about packets, ports, sockets, protocols. They don't understand that an iPhone does have a root file system. So facebook is it, and no distributed immitation cheese or diet margarine will replace their coca-cola brand social media. What to do?

eevilspock 8y ago
https://gitlab.com/upend/upend.org-content/blob/master/raison-d-etre.md https://gitlab.com/upend/upend.org-content/blob/master/raiso...

carapace 8y ago

Parity is one solution. "Total surveillance is the perfection of democracy." > The true horror of technological omniscience is that it shall force us for once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we shall have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. The new equilibrium will not involve tilting at the windmills of ubiquitous sensors and processing power but rather learning what explicit rules we can actually live by, finding, in effect, the real shape of human society. Parity of information is the difference between Star Trek and North Korea.

UncleEntity 8y ago
Yep, like information on Omega where they not only restricted information from basically everyone but would resort to straight up thievery to ensure it could never be developed. Sounds like North Korea to me...
- deleted 8y ago
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- carapace 8y ago
  Are you talking about tht one lousy Voyager episode? I hardly think that invalidates the ethos of the whole franchise? Maybe you prefer "The Orville"?

narvind 8y ago

Just to take away the creepiness factor, I'd say things like: Passengers who shared their favorite drinks with us rate us higher because we know them better and serve them accordingly. This is akin to amazon's main website changing "We recommend the following to you" to: "People who bought this also bought" - to induce a subtle hint of jealousy that others are getting a better deal and this is totally optional. Any recommendation system should be a voluntary opt-in feature and should consistently do a great job at recommending.

nitwit005 8y ago

This sort of thing always reminds me of Idiocracy: "Welcome to Costco i love you". Occasionally you run into a genuinely nice staff member at the supermarket who immediately learns your name, asks about your kids, etc. Companies notice how everyone is pleased with that, and then get the idea that they'll somehow force the behavior onto the rest of the staff. Everyone is forced to greet you, thank you by (poorly pronounced) name off credit card, and they send secret shoppers to penalize them if they fail to do these things. The end result of which ends up being negative, because no one particularly likes hearing friendly words that clearly aren't genuine.

everybodyknows 8y ago

Personal wellbeing hint: Do not ever joke about an airline pilot's recent alcohol intake, as the article suggests. This has been done, was treated as a genuine accusation, and precipitated cancellation of the flight. Don't fully recall consequences to the joker, but they weren't good, starting with being identified by seat number to fellow passengers.

mirimir 8y ago
That would, of course, be stupid. But given the capability to know such information, you'd also know the names and email addresses of all passengers. So just send a report on the pilot to them all. From a thoroughly anonymized and proxied account. Including yourself as a recipient.
bronco21016 8y ago
Unfortunately, the day and age of social media requires any accusations, joking or not, to be treated as real. How horrible would it be for an airline to allow the pilots to fly when someone suggested they may have been unfit to fly and the accusation was recorded with employees of the airline shown to be aware of the accusations. The lawsuits would be ridiculous. Don’t joke around about things in the airport or on an airplane. Safety and security are generally number one in the minds of the front line employees. Turns out we like going home alive too.

kazinator 8y ago

No flying experience will be correctly personalized to everyone's true preferences until we see attractive stewardesses sitting in a few laps. Until then, it's just a harmless sham.

cosmic_ape 8y ago

A bit different, but something similar does happen already, when people rate taxi drivers, cashiers in a store, or people commenting on airbnb hosts. These reactions often get personal rather than being based on an objective evaluation of a transaction. Point is, the "flight crew"s and even the "pilots" are not the corporation. The corporation may easily sacrifice their privacy if its believed to contribute the bottom line. Even the CEO might be sacrificed. The really private things about a corporation are its finances, its tradeoffs of customer benefit vs "efficiency", its market segmentation policies, etc.