Re: Revelations ??? Really ?
For me, Drbig above nails it.
Facebook walls and twitter feeds might be considered public information but by that logic, so is the brand of shoes you wear, what train you catch in the morning, what you eat for lunch and how you have your coffee. So to are any words you exchange with a loved one in a public place or the groceries you pickup on the way home.
All that is public information but I doubt I am the only one who would much rather that information not be collected, collated and cross-referenced.
As Drbig said, this collection of every scrap of public information about a person is like being followed by someone all day, everyday, seeing them across the aisle from you on the bus or walking 2 steps behind you in the grocery store, diligently marking down every item you put in your basket. Well, he didn't go to that detail but the point is that that is all technically public information and, by your logic, we should feel no outrage at all were a government agent to follow us around night and day recording every thing we do and every interaction we have.
I can only speak for myself but I suspect that it's not just me that nevertheless feels very much outraged at this level of surveillance.
The problem is that privacy laws have not kept pace with technology. In time gone by there was a certain amount of physical resources required to map out the life of a person. This naturally limited how much data could be gathered on any one person and also, how many people could be subject to such intrusive monitoring at any one time.
Now, that barrier is removed.
This is an IT site and one of the perennial questions is what exactly IS 'Big Data'. Well, for me, big data signifies the point where the breadth of data collected causes new information to appear.
A great article I once read showed one of the first successful attempts with 'big data'. As I recall, it was at Target (or similar) and the system worked well. Too well in fact. In the end, I understand a big wakeup call was when a father of a young girl came into the store demanding to see the manager. He was upset that his daughter had been receiving coupons and special offers in the mail related to maternity wear - this despite the fact that she was clearly not pregnant.
It turned out that the young girl was, in fact, pregnant. What was proven was that through collection of enough publicly-available information, you can infer some very private details - details that people might not wish to share and did not explicitly make 'public'.
The store had never met the girl nor even seen her. Even if they had, it would have done no good as she was not showing yet. Her own father, whom she lived with, had not yet realised she was pregnant and yet a store down the street, relying on nothing more than a collection of data points, had correctly deduced that this young lady was carrying a child.
There is a big difference between reading someone's twitter feed and sifting every tweet, forum post, youtube comment, product review and Facebook update that person has ever written and cross-referencing the output with similar results from their family, their colleagues, their neighbours and indeed everyone they know and a great many people they don't.
That's before you even start to merge that data with the information that is not normally publicly accessible - phone records and e-mail history and so on.
So no, it's not an irrational fear of our peers reading our ramblings; it's a completely justified concern - and even outrage - that government agencies are compiling every word we write and every action we take into searchable profiles that reveal things about us that even our closest confidants don't know.
I decided not to spellcheck this because I am really tired. Sorry if the rant got away from me (more than normal).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
