Five Watching
You've likely read about the trails and travails of Facebook, how its (and your) data and privacy are collected and sold and used. Word is that Amazon, still unprofitable in its shipping and products, makes most of its money from its data, which pretty much means...you; add Google to the mix and you're almost there. Microsoft and Apple round out the picture, making the news in everything from the New York Review of Books (in a review of Alexander Klimberg's book, The Darkening Web) to Rolling Stone. The term itself --the Big Five-- has been used to describe our fears in oil companies and corporate dominance (it was commonly used in Hawaii to describe the controlling sugar interests there)...even our psychological path to success. But trying to tackle the subjects of such massive companies as Google (which runs the platform on which this blog is appearing) or Facebook or Apple would be an exercise in futility. So let's just jump to the data collection.
First off, you are probably feeling that you're just an ordinary person minding your business so why do you need to worry. You're not a mogul or a top military decision maker or (gasp) a politician. You just wake up, go to work at whatever (or not) and check out the internet now and then, perhaps a quick purchase on Amazon or Ebay, or a short call to Uber for some lunch, or maybe even book a flight or answer a posting or who knows what. Then you enter that sweepstakes, nothing big, just a quick cell phone number with your name and address; and update a few of those dang digital coupons. Look, save $1.00! Oh, and check out that new Netflix film; and hey, is that a camera up there on that street light? Or on that doorbell? Oops, better remotely check if you locked your door/shut off your sprinklers/plugged in Alexa (or Barbie). Anyway, doesn't matter because who would be interested or have the room to store all those little tidbits of your life? You're just you, a droid of sorts, one of zillions of people out there and basically unrecognizable, other than your medical history and DNA, fingerprints and such (everyone has seemingly gotten hacked and compromised your Social Security so you not as worried as you once were).
So, did you happen to do any of those things, maybe even passing through airport security with your license or passport scanned? You're in the system. Collecting those store points with your card, or adding those miles? You're in the system. Using your phone or navigation system to find that dang restaurant? You're in the system. Signed that user agreement to nab that app or update your software? You're in the system. New algorhithms and data structures are growing increasingly more sophisticated in what they eliminate and "figure out." Facial recognition, something that seemed quite futuristic, is likely just years away (China is taking the lead and expanding its advance software to Africa; said a piece in Quartz: Facial recognition in particular has trouble differentiating faces that are not white, according to a study by MIT’s Media Lab...CloudWalk has already recalibrated its existing technology through three-dimensional light technology in order to recognize darker skin tones. In order to recognize other characteristics that may differ from China’s population, CloudWalk is also developing a system that recognizes different hairstyles and body shapes, another representative explained to the Global Times. China is focused on becoming the world leader in artificial intelligence, using facial recognition for everything from catching criminals to buying at KFC. With the largest surveillance system already in place, China is also building one of the world’s most comprehensive facial recognition databases.
So one quick disclosure and that is that I am not on Facebook so any commentaries are not from personal experience but rather from reports (to which I've provided links to check out). And check out you should for some of the stats on what is real news and what is fake news are somewhat startling...so much so that even Google is noticing (in March of this year it pledged $300 million over 3 years to work to provide "authoritative news" and create a Disinfo Lab said The New York Times). But dig behind a site such as Truthfeed and other far-right sites and you'll discover it's pretty much run by one person and well-funded, and very popular. Said Bloomberg Businessweek: Truthfeed’s ascent has coincided with the rise of false information spread via social media that inundated the 2016 election. Researchers at the Berkman Klein Center, who studied 2 million news articles and their popularity on social media in the 18 months before the election, found that extreme-right-wing misinformation sites had far surpassed the Facebook popularity of right-leaning professional news outlets. Truthfeed, they found, garnered more Facebook shares than the Wall Street Journal and National Review combined and almost equaled the reach of Fox News, despite Truthfeed not existing for more than half the study period.
So there's that dang Facebook again. Big deal. But what exactly does it (or any of the Big Five, for that matter) know or want to know about you ? Does "liking" curly fries make you stand out as more intelligent? A study from Cambridge way back in 2013 said that the answer might be yes...and more (an interesting and somewhat more detailed study emerged from Maryland professor Jennifer Golbeck* who wrote Analyzing the Social Web and gave a talk on TED...watch it, especially if you "like" curly fries). Sound familiar, that word Cambridge? Can't quite place it? Let's jump to this year and the discovery that Facebook knew that the data mined by Cambridge Analytica (a private British political company that hired a professor from Cambridge University to do a study) juxtaposed from 270,000 quiz-takers to a profile of 50 million users, all of which was then illegally sold for political purposes; so why was Congress grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg? After all, such tactics in some form or another have been used before (Facebook did suspend the company from using its site data after 3 years had passed). So still, big deal for how much data could a company such as Facebook have on you? Reporter Sara Ashley O'Brien decided to find out and discovered this, among other things: After downloading my stored data on the site --I've been a member since 2004-- I was presented with an enormous amount of personal details that have been collected about me over the years. It had the phone number of my late grandmother who never had a Facebook account, or even an email address. It preserved the conversations I had with an ex -- someone with whom I thought I had deleted my digital ties. It even recalled times I was "poked," a feature I had forgotten about. I also learned that Kate Spade New York and MetLife have me on their advertiser lists. Reporter Brian Chen explored his Facebook data and wrote this in The New York Times: With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers --many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band -- had my contact information, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.
Much of this came from an investigation by the New York Times and summed up by reporter Jen O'Brien of Vox: Facebook let some device companies get information on its users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning, and events, according to the Times. It gave access to information about those users’ friends as well, even in some cases when those people believed they had barred any sharing at all...The publication tested Facebook’s data privacy channels using a 2013 BlackBerry device owned by one of its reporters. The BlackBerry retrieved identifying information for almost 295,000 Facebook users; the reporter has about 550 Facebook friends. The Times found Facebook let the phone access more than 50 types of information about the user and his friends. So how to block giving out all the info? Well...here's where it gets complicated. Rob Pegoraro provides the basic steps in a column he wrote in USA Today; but even then your information is spreading far faster than you can control. Perhaps the most penetrating (and alarming) way to visualize this is shown by technologist Gary Kovacs as he demonstrates the tracking add-on for Firefox, one which lets you --the user-- see just where your information is going (and how quickly it is happening). Even my spending just one hour on Internet Explorer and Google results in over a gigabyte of cache history they've accumulated and which I have to delete (not to mention the slew of tracking cookies).** Just think about it...every app you install on your phone or computer will usually ask for permission to access your contacts, directory and other data; deny such access and the app will not be installed. In other words, all of this blame on sites such as Facebook and Google and Amazon is really of our own making. Okay, it's gotten out of hand but truth be told, we gave our permission whether we read the extensive user agreements or not. And another truth-be-told thing, there's much more...Europe adding new data-gathering rules, China instituting social profiling that can stop you from boarding a train or a flight, Amazon finalizing "conversational" bots for those who want to be alone but perhaps chat with something non-threatening (such as Alexa); so unfortunately, this will have to extend into another post. Apologies...
*Author and professor Golbeck talks more about this in a TED blog, adding this: We are actually in the middle of a project where we’ve been showing people the Facebook privacy policy, and then alternatively having them watch this interactive video called “Take This Lollipop,” which is one of my favorite privacy-oriented things online. It’s an interactive personalized horror movie where this creepy stalker guy looks at your Facebook profile --which is generated because you click “Connect with Facebook” when you go to the website-- and he looks at all your pictures and gets really angry and then kind of tracks you down. When it first came out, I remember thinking, “Oh, I’m not going to bother trying this, because I’m one of the people in the world who knows the most about Facebook privacy settings. I have them cranked up so high; there’s no way it could possibly see anything on my profile.” A week later, I thought, “Well, you know, let’s click on it and see,” and it got all this data that I didn’t think it could get. I remember thinking, if I don’t understand what kind of data is being given to apps, how can anybody else understand?...it’s really important that people understand that there are computational techniques that will reveal all kinds of information about you that you’re not aware that you’re sharing.
**I use the free version of Glary Utilities which cleans such "junk" off of your computer; for my mobile devices I tend to use the free version of Clean Master...but there are many such "cleaning" utilities out there; and a review of the many browsers done by Windows Chimp might make you switch to a new browser as well, although even they mention things such as "privacy issues aside." Caveat emptor...
First off, you are probably feeling that you're just an ordinary person minding your business so why do you need to worry. You're not a mogul or a top military decision maker or (gasp) a politician. You just wake up, go to work at whatever (or not) and check out the internet now and then, perhaps a quick purchase on Amazon or Ebay, or a short call to Uber for some lunch, or maybe even book a flight or answer a posting or who knows what. Then you enter that sweepstakes, nothing big, just a quick cell phone number with your name and address; and update a few of those dang digital coupons. Look, save $1.00! Oh, and check out that new Netflix film; and hey, is that a camera up there on that street light? Or on that doorbell? Oops, better remotely check if you locked your door/shut off your sprinklers/plugged in Alexa (or Barbie). Anyway, doesn't matter because who would be interested or have the room to store all those little tidbits of your life? You're just you, a droid of sorts, one of zillions of people out there and basically unrecognizable, other than your medical history and DNA, fingerprints and such (everyone has seemingly gotten hacked and compromised your Social Security so you not as worried as you once were).
So, did you happen to do any of those things, maybe even passing through airport security with your license or passport scanned? You're in the system. Collecting those store points with your card, or adding those miles? You're in the system. Using your phone or navigation system to find that dang restaurant? You're in the system. Signed that user agreement to nab that app or update your software? You're in the system. New algorhithms and data structures are growing increasingly more sophisticated in what they eliminate and "figure out." Facial recognition, something that seemed quite futuristic, is likely just years away (China is taking the lead and expanding its advance software to Africa; said a piece in Quartz: Facial recognition in particular has trouble differentiating faces that are not white, according to a study by MIT’s Media Lab...CloudWalk has already recalibrated its existing technology through three-dimensional light technology in order to recognize darker skin tones. In order to recognize other characteristics that may differ from China’s population, CloudWalk is also developing a system that recognizes different hairstyles and body shapes, another representative explained to the Global Times. China is focused on becoming the world leader in artificial intelligence, using facial recognition for everything from catching criminals to buying at KFC. With the largest surveillance system already in place, China is also building one of the world’s most comprehensive facial recognition databases.
So one quick disclosure and that is that I am not on Facebook so any commentaries are not from personal experience but rather from reports (to which I've provided links to check out). And check out you should for some of the stats on what is real news and what is fake news are somewhat startling...so much so that even Google is noticing (in March of this year it pledged $300 million over 3 years to work to provide "authoritative news" and create a Disinfo Lab said The New York Times). But dig behind a site such as Truthfeed and other far-right sites and you'll discover it's pretty much run by one person and well-funded, and very popular. Said Bloomberg Businessweek: Truthfeed’s ascent has coincided with the rise of false information spread via social media that inundated the 2016 election. Researchers at the Berkman Klein Center, who studied 2 million news articles and their popularity on social media in the 18 months before the election, found that extreme-right-wing misinformation sites had far surpassed the Facebook popularity of right-leaning professional news outlets. Truthfeed, they found, garnered more Facebook shares than the Wall Street Journal and National Review combined and almost equaled the reach of Fox News, despite Truthfeed not existing for more than half the study period.
So there's that dang Facebook again. Big deal. But what exactly does it (or any of the Big Five, for that matter) know or want to know about you ? Does "liking" curly fries make you stand out as more intelligent? A study from Cambridge way back in 2013 said that the answer might be yes...and more (an interesting and somewhat more detailed study emerged from Maryland professor Jennifer Golbeck* who wrote Analyzing the Social Web and gave a talk on TED...watch it, especially if you "like" curly fries). Sound familiar, that word Cambridge? Can't quite place it? Let's jump to this year and the discovery that Facebook knew that the data mined by Cambridge Analytica (a private British political company that hired a professor from Cambridge University to do a study) juxtaposed from 270,000 quiz-takers to a profile of 50 million users, all of which was then illegally sold for political purposes; so why was Congress grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg? After all, such tactics in some form or another have been used before (Facebook did suspend the company from using its site data after 3 years had passed). So still, big deal for how much data could a company such as Facebook have on you? Reporter Sara Ashley O'Brien decided to find out and discovered this, among other things: After downloading my stored data on the site --I've been a member since 2004-- I was presented with an enormous amount of personal details that have been collected about me over the years. It had the phone number of my late grandmother who never had a Facebook account, or even an email address. It preserved the conversations I had with an ex -- someone with whom I thought I had deleted my digital ties. It even recalled times I was "poked," a feature I had forgotten about. I also learned that Kate Spade New York and MetLife have me on their advertiser lists. Reporter Brian Chen explored his Facebook data and wrote this in The New York Times: With a few clicks, I learned that about 500 advertisers --many that I had never heard of, like Bad Dad, a motorcycle parts store, and Space Jesus, an electronica band -- had my contact information, which could include my email address, phone number and full name. Facebook also had my entire phone book, including the number to ring my apartment buzzer. The social network had even kept a permanent record of the roughly 100 people I had deleted from my friends list over the last 14 years, including my exes.
Much of this came from an investigation by the New York Times and summed up by reporter Jen O'Brien of Vox: Facebook let some device companies get information on its users’ relationship status, religion, political leaning, and events, according to the Times. It gave access to information about those users’ friends as well, even in some cases when those people believed they had barred any sharing at all...The publication tested Facebook’s data privacy channels using a 2013 BlackBerry device owned by one of its reporters. The BlackBerry retrieved identifying information for almost 295,000 Facebook users; the reporter has about 550 Facebook friends. The Times found Facebook let the phone access more than 50 types of information about the user and his friends. So how to block giving out all the info? Well...here's where it gets complicated. Rob Pegoraro provides the basic steps in a column he wrote in USA Today; but even then your information is spreading far faster than you can control. Perhaps the most penetrating (and alarming) way to visualize this is shown by technologist Gary Kovacs as he demonstrates the tracking add-on for Firefox, one which lets you --the user-- see just where your information is going (and how quickly it is happening). Even my spending just one hour on Internet Explorer and Google results in over a gigabyte of cache history they've accumulated and which I have to delete (not to mention the slew of tracking cookies).** Just think about it...every app you install on your phone or computer will usually ask for permission to access your contacts, directory and other data; deny such access and the app will not be installed. In other words, all of this blame on sites such as Facebook and Google and Amazon is really of our own making. Okay, it's gotten out of hand but truth be told, we gave our permission whether we read the extensive user agreements or not. And another truth-be-told thing, there's much more...Europe adding new data-gathering rules, China instituting social profiling that can stop you from boarding a train or a flight, Amazon finalizing "conversational" bots for those who want to be alone but perhaps chat with something non-threatening (such as Alexa); so unfortunately, this will have to extend into another post. Apologies...
*Author and professor Golbeck talks more about this in a TED blog, adding this: We are actually in the middle of a project where we’ve been showing people the Facebook privacy policy, and then alternatively having them watch this interactive video called “Take This Lollipop,” which is one of my favorite privacy-oriented things online. It’s an interactive personalized horror movie where this creepy stalker guy looks at your Facebook profile --which is generated because you click “Connect with Facebook” when you go to the website-- and he looks at all your pictures and gets really angry and then kind of tracks you down. When it first came out, I remember thinking, “Oh, I’m not going to bother trying this, because I’m one of the people in the world who knows the most about Facebook privacy settings. I have them cranked up so high; there’s no way it could possibly see anything on my profile.” A week later, I thought, “Well, you know, let’s click on it and see,” and it got all this data that I didn’t think it could get. I remember thinking, if I don’t understand what kind of data is being given to apps, how can anybody else understand?...it’s really important that people understand that there are computational techniques that will reveal all kinds of information about you that you’re not aware that you’re sharing.
**I use the free version of Glary Utilities which cleans such "junk" off of your computer; for my mobile devices I tend to use the free version of Clean Master...but there are many such "cleaning" utilities out there; and a review of the many browsers done by Windows Chimp might make you switch to a new browser as well, although even they mention things such as "privacy issues aside." Caveat emptor...
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