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posted by martyb on Saturday August 29 2015, @01:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-wonder-if-they-track-sales-of-tin-foil? dept.

http://www.cio.com/article/2977027/intel-reveals-big-datas-dirty-little-secret.html

The article is entitled "Intel reveals big data's dirty little secret" but I read it a little bit differently.

From the article: "Companies are spending billions on tools and engineering to analyse big data, though many are hampered by one little problem: they still don't know what to do with all the data they collect."

This means that, of all the egregious breaches of personal privacy that companies regularly perform (the Target-knows-you're-pregnant-when-your-parents-don't story comes to mind), they have still only scratched the surface of making sense of your information, and using it effectively. Which means that, as Big Data gets people who actually know what they're doing, the more frightening the possibilities become, which is probably only a matter of time.

How would you feel about getting a bunch of targeted spam from divorce lawyers because your wife/husband's personal details were in the big Ashley Madison data leak, before you even heard about it? What if you were the guy who got drunk and put a profile up one time after a big fight but never followed up on it? This is why I don't have a Facebook account.


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  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday August 29 2015, @06:16PM

    by Gravis (4596) on Saturday August 29 2015, @06:16PM (#229498)

    Every time these stories come out, we get scenarios designed to appeal to our passions and our prejudices that are cynical in nature. Not only that, but they're unimaginative, because it could be so much worse than that.

    it's seems to me that appeals to realism rather than your personal fantasy of helpful companies.

    We cannot see all the possible sociopolitical futures this technology enables. Our lack of vision necessarily inhibits our ability to respond, so assuming the worst is a recipe for closing off possibility.

    accurate predictions of the future are based on the past behavior and responses.

    I'm not advocating not being skeptical, instead I'm suggesting that skepticism unleavened by creative optimism weighs heavy on the stomach.

    this is know as the optimism bias [wikipedia.org] which is a waste of time.

    Let's have some freakin vision.

    here's some freakin vision: the future will be full of people like the present and the bad people will leverage technology is bad way just like the are doing now and have done in the past.

    grow up.

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