The Darkness of Big Data - III

Rules for Modern Living with Big Data

We, the citizens of our community, have a new presence, almost a consciousness living in parallel with us.  Something of a semi-consciousness, not contained in a single vessel, it make observations, accomplishes tasks, it makes predictions, and it evolves prescriptions. An essential aspect is in the algorithms that massage, manipulate, and matriculate data to actionable spheres of information.

The algorithms, while not individually conscious do extract and store information about us in large volumes.  It does not hesitate to sift and sort information at the behest of an external agent.   Not unlike you, who also stores great volumes of information, they do nothing with it until a task is set - perhaps by a human operative.  With you, it’s all in a single container.  But with the machine, certain tasks operating like “interrupts” can be continuously active.  You also have certain tasks continuously active, e.g. danger, food.

This is not a self-reflecting or self-aware consciousness, but how many folks do you know that are always doing something, though never reflecting before, during, or after?  Irrelevant is the Turing test.  Forget the Turing test.  This is an inhuman consciousness though the progeny of humans.

It is not unlike having an unknown visitor listening outside our door, 24/7.  This visitor cannot be chased away, but what it learns from listening can be limited.  We know this, happily.  It’s not unlike living in an apartment next to another occupied by a busybody - with great hearing.  We talk more softly.

Get accustomed to the fact that you are not really anonymous.  The servers and their algorithms have unlimited time and will scour many resources to make identifications about you.  This “you” is a statistical “you.”  Otherwise put, it is everyone.  

Don’t

• Take surveys unless you really want to show support for something.  This includes polls and customer satisfaction surveys.   Always say you have no opinion.  Otherwise, you give more information than the value received.  The survey provider wants information about me to compare with information of thousands of others in its task to learn how to sell better.  Example.  A couple of  years ago I contributed to a political campaign.  Ever since that time, I’ve received dozens of requests for more money, but even more requests to complete various surveys. (I never take the surveys.)  The parties are now into predictive and uplift modeling methods to recruit votes - a modern horror. Now used extensively in politics, it is worth looking up.
•   Engage with social media sites.  Even posting photos can reveal quite a lot, with image recognition software.  Posting information about your day or family frequently gives the algorithms quite a bit information about what kind of person you are and what stimuli make achieve some desired reaction.

Do

•   Take anonymous surveys.  But be careful, you are not connected  to the website through cookies. Cookies are hidden little information snippets your computer stores on behalf of some client website.  For example, when I go to amazon.com, it knows who I am right away.  No log in  is necessary.  If I use a different computer, it does not.  I am identified by resident cookies.
• Use “anonymous” windows that many browsers now offer.  Of course, these merely removes the site tracing from your computer, not the information gleaned about you server side. 
• Minimize any personal profile of information you post or offer.

BTW, confidential email is an oxymoron.  The cloud is not private. Facebook is a food source for the algorithms. Ditto for blogs, like this one.