Creepy Data...Always for Sale

Interesting article in today’s WSJ regarding data collection and it nefarious uses. It starts off telling the story of an anonymous woman who had her ex use social media against her. Posting her personal information (address and physical attributes) on dating sites and other more secretive sites; men we are propositioning her at her home (harassment).The article further explains that data can be weaponized. Geoffrey Folwer explains further that “Meanwhile, data aggregators send their bots to collect anything and everything they can about you: addresses, browsing habits, even estimated net worth. Then they glue it all together, facts and wild guesses alike, into dossiers. That’s the legal side of data collection. Things get scarier when your tax accountant, credit-card company or email provider gets hacked”. The article touches on so points I have made earlier in my Blog about the prevalence of AI. There is an entire industry making billions of dollars mining you and it has tripled in size in the last 5 years. The FCC has rolled back restrictions on the data your internet service provider can collect. It’s about self-determination. “If people don’t have the ability to control or understand how their data is being used, it can lead to severe difficulties,” says Julie Brill, a former FTC commissioner and current partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells, who helped lead a big investigation of data collectors. Ms. Brill goes on to point out the current laws only protect your health and financial data (which are very important indeed), but still not enough. Fowler for the column took a half dozen volunteers and submitted them to a study to see how much “creepy data” he could find on his subjects in an hour; he managed to “shock everyone”. He sorted the searches into 3 levels; “level one was calling up what’s out there and totally public. Lots of people have googled themselves, but fewer are familiar with “people search engines” like FamilyTreeNow.com and Spokeo, which pull together and cross-reference public data, such as property records and court reports, into one place. Anyone can use them to look for birth dates, current and former addresses, phone numbers, gobs of relatives—even ex-lovers and roommates. Although FamilyTree and Spokeo have their legitimate uses they are the go to source for online harassers and impersonators. Level two Folwer used Google Maps, Maps TimeLine which demonstrates how “Google is gathering a dossier about you that would make a spy jealous. Depending on how much you use Google products, there could be an hour-by-hour map of everywhere you’ve ever visited. Yes, everywhere. On Google’s My Activity site, you can see everything else they’re cataloging: searches, websites you visit in Chrome, YouTube videos you watch, even recordings of your voice to Google’s Assistant”. This article/study further demonstrate what I think most of us who follow this technology and data analytics, realize already, there is no such thing as privacy anymore. If you look at media your average citizen can become a star or be destroyed depending on if someone records you and if it goes viral or not. These are extraordinary times where everyone in connected and mostly anything Is for sale (data). My hope is that the FCC starts to develop common sense legislation to assist people who are having their lives destroyed, or have the possibility of having their lives destroyed. Fowler plans to expand next week further on this topic and I will look to follow-up on this discussion.