3 ms·

This makes me think. What happens when partial profiles are matched to the wrong person? Like, it's very likely these systems are going to match different peop

This makes me think. What happens when partial profiles are matched to the wrong person? Like, it's very likely these systems are going to match different people in the same household/network because... how can they even separate different people with different interests and a single person using many profiles? I suspect all our "valuable user data" is tainted by default and its monetary value is an illusion. We do know that the systems are overzealous, and the algorithms driving those systems are far from perfect (and in case of ML models, high chances of it being non-deterministic, to boot). A friend recently got some of those ISP copyright strikes because the fiancee of his sister got relocated to his house for a few days and decided to leech from the network to download some AAA videogames. Of course the strikes were to my friend's name, because they have no way to know some stranger did it instead. I can easily see my data profile saying I'm into horoscopes and that voodoo because my mother browses that stuff all day from the network assigned to my name. I'm sure there are attempts to defeat incognito/private tabs by bundling all "indecisive" data to the main profile in a given IP, so a large household can be a completely schizophrenic data profile with data mixed from a lot of users in that household. Imagine someone in your house has been using some extremist or taboo site. If that data is mixed up with yours, and a person with bad intent wants to take advantage of leaked data they obtained on you...they have a pretty strong weapon to assassinate your image. "You can't deny it, it's in the data. Your cousin did it? Oh what an ignoble attempt to save your butt, how lowly!". Since you have no way to plausibly deny it, it can be a strong blackmail weapon. Maybe stronger than medical data leaks in this weirdly political climate we got now.

pjerem 5y ago
> Of course the strikes were to my friend's name, because they have no way to know some stranger did it instead. For the anecdote, in France, we have a pretty stupid law (that was pushed by our really strong culture industry lobbies) where you can be pursued for downloading copyrighted content but also for not having secured your home network hardly enough so you can’t argue that’s it’s your neighbor over your wifi. But it’s only a little part of what our culture mafia achieved here, we also have to pay a tax on every device with storage that is redistributed to « copyright owners ».
- falsaberN1 5y ago
  We have the same tax here. Pretty insulting when I'm a content creator myself (and I'd never pirate the artists it's protecting, I think they are all terrible), but not many ways left to import without bigger costs (customs).
mdp2021 5y ago
You could as well be wary of the possibility of misinterpretation of your own actual actions, which is consistent with the fear of a dim non-intelligence mixing up your data and others' data. The same dim non-intelligence, that one spawn of which seems e.g. to think that since you bought a car last month you should be proposed more cars, that dim non-intelligence may decide that since you watched videos of author Tom you subscribe to the ideas of Tom, that if you read the G. you are a junkie and if you read the S. you believe senator Beast has dignity, that if you... I was about to write "if you are studying material about new vaccines before booking inoculation then you must be a vaccine opposer, believing in witchcraft, credulous of any voice, a conspiracy theorist and an irresponsible sociopath": no, this actually I witnessed in real life, acted by adult professionals. So you figure the profiling a dumb algorithm can do. "The new prejudice factory" may be out of lack of wits, it may be out of "economizing" - like when the order to kill all intellectuals was specified by "you will recognize them: they are those who wear glasses". To some it is not worth their while to discriminate. One would normally go baesyan to formulate some hypothesis _with the single intent to put them into discussion under the filter of intelligence_, never to take them as plausible. Once. It is a world increasing in complexity within societies which are abandoning the sense of complexity.

pjerem 5y ago

> Of course the strikes were to my friend's name, because they have no way to know some stranger did it instead. For the anecdote, in France, we have a pretty stupid law (that was pushed by our really strong culture industry lobbies) where you can be pursued for downloading copyrighted content but also for not having secured your home network hardly enough so you can’t argue that’s it’s your neighbor over your wifi. But it’s only a little part of what our culture mafia achieved here, we also have to pay a tax on every device with storage that is redistributed to « copyright owners ».

falsaberN1 5y ago
We have the same tax here. Pretty insulting when I'm a content creator myself (and I'd never pirate the artists it's protecting, I think they are all terrible), but not many ways left to import without bigger costs (customs).

mdp2021 5y ago

You could as well be wary of the possibility of misinterpretation of your own actual actions, which is consistent with the fear of a dim non-intelligence mixing up your data and others' data. The same dim non-intelligence, that one spawn of which seems e.g. to think that since you bought a car last month you should be proposed more cars, that dim non-intelligence may decide that since you watched videos of author Tom you subscribe to the ideas of Tom, that if you read the G. you are a junkie and if you read the S. you believe senator Beast has dignity, that if you... I was about to write "if you are studying material about new vaccines before booking inoculation then you must be a vaccine opposer, believing in witchcraft, credulous of any voice, a conspiracy theorist and an irresponsible sociopath": no, this actually I witnessed in real life, acted by adult professionals. So you figure the profiling a dumb algorithm can do. "The new prejudice factory" may be out of lack of wits, it may be out of "economizing" - like when the order to kill all intellectuals was specified by "you will recognize them: they are those who wear glasses". To some it is not worth their while to discriminate. One would normally go baesyan to formulate some hypothesis _with the single intent to put them into discussion under the filter of intelligence_, never to take them as plausible. Once. It is a world increasing in complexity within societies which are abandoning the sense of complexity.