5 ms·

Well I imagine the immediate downside is having companies that you dont care for trying to influence you with data you never gave them possibly quite on purpose

Well I imagine the immediate downside is having companies that you dont care for trying to influence you with data you never gave them possibly quite on purpose. In the end that's just a privacy concern again. I think the problem is always the scale. Knowing one persons data isn't to harmful to society. But knowing so many and having real incentive to use and abuse it has always been the problem. That type of data lead to Trumps election and Brexit both from the same person. So data can definitely move nations. I think the best option is to break the big tech companies up. On smaller scales they are less harmful.

dalbasal 7y ago
I think maybe we're speaking past eachother. When we say "break up" in the context of Google... what do we mean? Geographically? By "vertical" like Gmail & stuff, YouTube and search, advertising & making money, waymo and other loss making operations..? I'm not sure what the solutions to all the issues are. But, apart from the issues around privacy (and I'm not sure the conventions we're aiming for are great on privacy anyway), we just can't "physically" own our data individually. That's not how data works. The data from lots of cars driving around can become a self driving car program. The data from you driving around cannot (never say never though). It's data's qualities at scale that are being discussed here. Amazon knows what and how and how much who buys, at scale. If an allegation/indictment is made, it will/may allege that at Amazon scale, this is monopolistic.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  I'm suggesting that the bad effects are usually from scale. So the only real effective way imo is to reduce the scale by breaking the companies both horizontally and vertically. Maybe each vertical has two or more companies created from it idk. But if there are more actors smaller populations can have a larger effect on policy because now the companies don't have many revenue streams to hold out until people forget. They would be subject to immediate public demands and people would have competitors they could flock to. Additionally many actors competing with data at smaller scales I think reduces the harmful effects of singular bad influence pointing society in the wrong direction. But I agree I don't think there is much we can do about data ownership. The most we can do is make laws saying you have to inform them when you collect their data and that's already being done. Users just need to be conscious about their activity and sites they go to. But there needs to be real competitive alternatives to switch to if that is going to be effective.
repolfx 7y ago
You don't have any evidence that "data" is the reason why Trump or Brexit won. Recall: - Trump was not an experienced campaigner, had no real campaign database and spent half as much as Clinton. - Leaving the EU was represented by two different campaigns which hated each other, none of which had any meaningful amounts of data, and were up against a vastly well funded and organised campaign by the government, literally, the organisation that has the most data on everyone. Trump won because Clinton was a terrible candidate who had a policy of starting a war with Russia (her no-fly zone over Syria) and Leave won because Remain ran a terrible campaign that boiled down to "we can't leave because the EU will punish us severely if we do and we are weak". You don't have to be a campaigning genius to understand that people don't like these things - vague allusions to 'data' aren't necessary.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  Actually you have plenty of evidence. AggregateIQ through data was able to automatically fashion ads tailored at capturing audience members susceptible to certain messages. Leave used that data to campaign and attract voters who otherwise would have not voted. Cambridge Analytica employed similar methods with similar data to help secure president Trumps election. Both companies belonged to Robert Mercer who worked on AI and data analytics in its earlier years. You can read plenty on how both those companies were used to secure those votes. It's all in the public domain. Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles.
  - CodiePetersen 7y ago
    I might also add that Robert Mercer donated to both Trumps campaign and to prominent Brexit proponents. I forget exactly who but like I said it's all public knowledge.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles. You actually don't know that. In fact nobody, including those making the claims, can prove it made any difference. Both AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica could well have had no impact whatsoever: this stuff is pure faith based spending. It's like spending on campaign advertising. Some people take it as an article of faith that whoever spends more wins, but that has been repeatedly proven false in the real world. Apparently political ad spending isn't such a big deal after all. And again, you must remember that in both those cases their opponents spent far more, on all kinds of things including data based voter targeting. If generic "data" were so valuable they'd surely have achieved massive victories, but they lost

dalbasal 7y ago

I think maybe we're speaking past eachother. When we say "break up" in the context of Google... what do we mean? Geographically? By "vertical" like Gmail & stuff, YouTube and search, advertising & making money, waymo and other loss making operations..? I'm not sure what the solutions to all the issues are. But, apart from the issues around privacy (and I'm not sure the conventions we're aiming for are great on privacy anyway), we just can't "physically" own our data individually. That's not how data works. The data from lots of cars driving around can become a self driving car program. The data from you driving around cannot (never say never though). It's data's qualities at scale that are being discussed here. Amazon knows what and how and how much who buys, at scale. If an allegation/indictment is made, it will/may allege that at Amazon scale, this is monopolistic.

CodiePetersen 7y ago
I'm suggesting that the bad effects are usually from scale. So the only real effective way imo is to reduce the scale by breaking the companies both horizontally and vertically. Maybe each vertical has two or more companies created from it idk. But if there are more actors smaller populations can have a larger effect on policy because now the companies don't have many revenue streams to hold out until people forget. They would be subject to immediate public demands and people would have competitors they could flock to. Additionally many actors competing with data at smaller scales I think reduces the harmful effects of singular bad influence pointing society in the wrong direction. But I agree I don't think there is much we can do about data ownership. The most we can do is make laws saying you have to inform them when you collect their data and that's already being done. Users just need to be conscious about their activity and sites they go to. But there needs to be real competitive alternatives to switch to if that is going to be effective.

repolfx 7y ago

You don't have any evidence that "data" is the reason why Trump or Brexit won. Recall: - Trump was not an experienced campaigner, had no real campaign database and spent half as much as Clinton. - Leaving the EU was represented by two different campaigns which hated each other, none of which had any meaningful amounts of data, and were up against a vastly well funded and organised campaign by the government, literally, the organisation that has the most data on everyone. Trump won because Clinton was a terrible candidate who had a policy of starting a war with Russia (her no-fly zone over Syria) and Leave won because Remain ran a terrible campaign that boiled down to "we can't leave because the EU will punish us severely if we do and we are weak". You don't have to be a campaigning genius to understand that people don't like these things - vague allusions to 'data' aren't necessary.

CodiePetersen 7y ago
Actually you have plenty of evidence. AggregateIQ through data was able to automatically fashion ads tailored at capturing audience members susceptible to certain messages. Leave used that data to campaign and attract voters who otherwise would have not voted. Cambridge Analytica employed similar methods with similar data to help secure president Trumps election. Both companies belonged to Robert Mercer who worked on AI and data analytics in its earlier years. You can read plenty on how both those companies were used to secure those votes. It's all in the public domain. Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles.
- CodiePetersen 7y ago
  I might also add that Robert Mercer donated to both Trumps campaign and to prominent Brexit proponents. I forget exactly who but like I said it's all public knowledge.
- repolfx 7y ago
  Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles. You actually don't know that. In fact nobody, including those making the claims, can prove it made any difference. Both AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica could well have had no impact whatsoever: this stuff is pure faith based spending. It's like spending on campaign advertising. Some people take it as an article of faith that whoever spends more wins, but that has been repeatedly proven false in the real world. Apparently political ad spending isn't such a big deal after all. And again, you must remember that in both those cases their opponents spent far more, on all kinds of things including data based voter targeting. If generic "data" were so valuable they'd surely have achieved massive victories, but they lost