5 ms·

Not all (or even most) data is personal.

dredmorbius 5y ago
A fair point, though the data of interest to marketers, and others making use of targeted influencing and/or surveillance, is.
AussieWog93 5y ago
In the context of mainstream news reports on big tech, the "data" they're referring to is personal, or at the very least able to cause behavioural changes on an individual level. Journalists don't care about non-personal data ("only x% of users use the symbol insertion tool in Word 2016") - even though Microsoft certainly does - because it makes for a mundane news story.
nexuist 5y ago
Most data by itself is useless, even things we consider "private" like SSNs, credit cards, etc. They're like $20 for a bundle on the black market. But if you can link that stuff to browsing, location, or transaction history? Anyone with that can read you like a book. It's not about what data is collected so much as it is how much data is collected - and how much of the collection can be traced back to you through a cookie or IP address. That's the big problem. Anyone with enough random data about you can put together your life piece by piece.
- totalZero 5y ago
  The best defense is to reduce the size of the attack surface by living a life so bland that even perfect knowledge about you is altogether useless.
  - afiori 5y ago
    not really, the real strength is in predictive power. face recognition at one point stored your face as just 13 parameters, maybe our brain can be compressed in 20 billion parameters and reasonably approximated by ml with just 100 million parameters. if you want to go to the extreme you can say that every bit of data you give to Google/Facebook/Amazon goes toward training this mooch of Human simulation engine (which would be different from general artificial intelligence)
  - spicybright 5y ago
    I hope that's sarcasm.
    - totalZero 5y ago
      It is indeed.
      - zepto 5y ago
        Even so, there are many people who adopt it as a serious approach to life. Some consciously and some unconsciously.
        spicybright 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm usually good at picking up humor online, but I see so many people wasting their lives trying to appease corporations in ways that ultimately don't matter. It's very sad to watch.
nomorewords 5y ago
But this shouldn't matter. We still have a subconscious and we sometimes do things that we don't really think through, or do them on auto-pilot. So you could be doing things which you don't think through and they are still indicative of who you are as a person. But now, you don't know this part of you and you end up in a situation where some algorithm running on some servers somewhere is a better predictor for what you want (among other things) than your own thoughts. Truth is people seem to not care about their subconscious. And they fail to understand the power of data when combined with 1 million other people. I still hear the response 'Well I have nothing to hide' way too much from people living in 2021.

A fair point, though the data of interest to marketers, and others making use of targeted influencing and/or surveillance, is.

AussieWog93 5y ago

In the context of mainstream news reports on big tech, the "data" they're referring to is personal, or at the very least able to cause behavioural changes on an individual level. Journalists don't care about non-personal data ("only x% of users use the symbol insertion tool in Word 2016") - even though Microsoft certainly does - because it makes for a mundane news story.

nexuist 5y ago

Most data by itself is useless, even things we consider "private" like SSNs, credit cards, etc. They're like $20 for a bundle on the black market. But if you can link that stuff to browsing, location, or transaction history? Anyone with that can read you like a book. It's not about what data is collected so much as it is how much data is collected - and how much of the collection can be traced back to you through a cookie or IP address. That's the big problem. Anyone with enough random data about you can put together your life piece by piece.

totalZero 5y ago
The best defense is to reduce the size of the attack surface by living a life so bland that even perfect knowledge about you is altogether useless.
- afiori 5y ago
  not really, the real strength is in predictive power. face recognition at one point stored your face as just 13 parameters, maybe our brain can be compressed in 20 billion parameters and reasonably approximated by ml with just 100 million parameters. if you want to go to the extreme you can say that every bit of data you give to Google/Facebook/Amazon goes toward training this mooch of Human simulation engine (which would be different from general artificial intelligence)
- spicybright 5y ago
  I hope that's sarcasm.
  - totalZero 5y ago
    It is indeed.
    - zepto 5y ago
      Even so, there are many people who adopt it as a serious approach to life. Some consciously and some unconsciously.
      - spicybright 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm usually good at picking up humor online, but I see so many people wasting their lives trying to appease corporations in ways that ultimately don't matter. It's very sad to watch.

nomorewords 5y ago

But this shouldn't matter. We still have a subconscious and we sometimes do things that we don't really think through, or do them on auto-pilot. So you could be doing things which you don't think through and they are still indicative of who you are as a person. But now, you don't know this part of you and you end up in a situation where some algorithm running on some servers somewhere is a better predictor for what you want (among other things) than your own thoughts. Truth is people seem to not care about their subconscious. And they fail to understand the power of data when combined with 1 million other people. I still hear the response 'Well I have nothing to hide' way too much from people living in 2021.