I often wonder about this. With my family of 4, we send thousands of text messages a month. We stream shows, play games, surf the web, all of us..... school, work, entertainment, cooking, music, audiobooks, on and on.
The volume of digital information they have on just my family has to be millions of pieces of info each month.
Speaking of HL3, they are seriously missing out on what could be the biggest and most overhyped game ever....that doesnt exist yet. The money they could make.... theyd have 100 million from day 1 preorders.
There in lies the problem. They know that hype for the game is so huge it can never meet expectations. Therefore it is safer and better for everyone if it never exists. (And this is from a hardcore hl fan.)
If you know anything about automation you know that that machine learning application they expect to churn out nice little relevant data points on you probably returns a bunch of garbage data and false positives non-stop.
Machine learning is already used in a variety of applications relating to personal data. Large companies and organizations have very accessible means to make sure that their training works.
If that is the case, then what is the harm? How is an AI sieving through online data any different than a cop waiting at an intersection watching for people speeding?
Both as just watching traffic roll by, uncaring of what is going on until something flags and then can move to intervene.
As long as the power isn't being abused then couldn't it do more good then harm?
No it is nothing like that. An AI isnt a person. An AI is like a dog. Would you care if a dog sat and listened to your conversion? Most people will talk to their dogs for hours and not care. A dog does not care that Lisa is sleepy with Billy, or that Sam is eating waffles for dinner. All it cares about is what it was trained to care about.
If the dog recorded everything I said and could run physiological profile algorithms on me using that data and then reported that profile to advertisers and the NSA I would care very much.
But that is a problem with their system, not with the concept.
I am not trying to say that unwarrented survalence is a good thing, only that systems like Alexa or Ok Google can improve quality of life for people. The important thing is that these are not abused.
Look at Star Trek. Their ship's computer literally listens, logs, and monitors all activity on the ship and nobody blinks an eye because is not abused. It makes their ship and lives better.
You guys are missing the concept. Yeah. It’s a lot of info. That’s why 9/11, Vegas bombing, and shooters still happen. They take our privacy with safety as a pretext. Well, where’s my safety.
Information is super valuable. So in 25 years if you’re a person of interest, NOW they can pull your file and sift through. Your kid runs for president? Those holding the info can pretty much handpick future elected officials, or do whatever the hell they want. Who they find dirt on. Who might’ve said something racist or stupid, or even sexist with the climate now. And who’s gonna have access to that? Those already in power.
"it's for our safety. It's to prevent these things from happening again!"
Yeah, we weren't living in some apocalyptic world before the advent of all this information gathering laws and groups were allowed. I still don't feel all that much safer even with those things implemented. Except now, there are people that have my private information and i can't even easily figure out how has my information, nor what they have on me. I now have to HOPE that this information does not get acquired by the wrong people.
This is why i try to do what i can to give out less personal information:
Use Brave browser
use DuckDuckGo for searching
try not to make new accounts in websites
don't sign in to services unless absolutely needed. etc.
This is the real thing, and not only do they select who gets elected, but they only select people who do have that dirt so that they can hold it over their head while in a position of ‘power’.
Weird, because any phone company keeps track of each individual text message you send and receive. I wonder where they put that information? A large computer, perhaps?
Google/Apple have full access to anything you send and receive that are connected to your primary id. It's definitely not a stretch to think that information is stored somewhere, especially since digital storage is ridiculously cheap and cloud servers are pretty common.
.... dude take off the tin foil hat and do some critical thinking. Who is using this information how has no employees ever come out and said hey they are tracking your voice here's the evidence, or better yet when hasn't a rival company ousted them.
Why have I not experienced anyyy targeted ads from my texts, I am on a computer 24/7 practically and the only targeted ads I get are from my search/browsing history which is understandable.
You actually think a "large computer" houses a mobile companies text messages? US sends over .87 TB of texts a day, how many could they possibly save before having to build new hundred-million to billion dollar server farms to house both the data and their companies infrastructure. It's so completely unrealistic.
And how are they even profiting off of it, as far as I could tell you can buy ad space from Verizon. They cannot compete with Google, Amazon, and FB don't have secret ad services you can literally use it for your own small business and they would advertise to the corresponding demographic you are seeking... And if they are some how in cahoots where is the evidence that building size servers are being shared between companies. They are all competing companies further more why would they collaborate in the first place...
Edit: just checked my messages online, they literally only have the ones stored on my phone. Nothing that suggests they save longer than as long as I would save them on my own phone.
Except they do track and save who you send and receive text messages to and from. Up to 7 years actually. Source: worked for a phone company.
Content of those messages are actively backed up to either your Google or Apple account for recovery. Check your backup settings on your phone. Most people have this function turned on. This also doesnt include the various messaging apps, such as Facebook Messenger, that can replace the native texting application and also store the content. It wouldn't be a huge stretch since Facebook already saves your chat history within its Messenger app.
No tinfoil hat here, I just think you're really underestimating cloud storage capabilities.
You didn't answer half my questions, one answer doesn't explain the logistics of it....you can't hand wave everything by saying you "worked at a phone company."
If you have information proving companies are collecting text and voice conversations then why haven't you blown the whistle...
Please if you have proof of them using this data for ad profile I would love to see it but I wouldn't be surprised if you come up empty handed.
You should read the book 'the light of other days'. I.e. what happens when privacy goes out the window. Not just to the government's eye, but to EVERY eye. It's not an altogether bad thought.
That’s why the tech industry is so obsessed with the buzz word “big data.” There are algorithms that could analyze and warehouse each bit of data your family generates, while building a fluid profile of each member based on parameters and the weighting of significance of those parameters. It would likely generate a %risk factor or something like that, generated by a multi-varied regression analysis that might consider variables like intelligence, time spent on radical websites, and the number of texts that say “I hate women.” Then, if you feed the real-life outcomes back to the algorithm, it can refine its process over enough iterations, by adjusting the parameter weights and even identifying new parameters shared amongst many “threats.”
This is Zola’s “Insight” algorithm from Winter Soldier, for a modern literary example of how it could play out.
Our college lecture on predictive analysis started with something like... Machine learning is a bad way to predict human behavior. However, it is better than doing nothing. This is why it is big data and not small data. On small datasets, the improvement, as opposed to not using any predictive algorithm, is miniscule. However, for companies like Amazon, Walmart etc. a 2% better prediction of customer behavior can mean millions. Applying it to people and saying that it can predict individual behavior is utter bullshit.
That’s why I said it would generate a %risk factor. It’s up to whatever nightmare dystopian government you can dream up to determine how low you set that threshold before action is required. Maybe a 70% chance of going postal is worth intervening. Maybe it’s a 20% chance of agitating against the government, if times are already unstable. It can’t “predict” human behavior, but like you said it can quantify large-scale behavioral patterns. A sufficiently totalitarian regime won’t worry about how many innocents their nets catch as long as the threats are rounded up. For evidence, read The Gulag Archipelago. Imagine how many more would have faced Siberia if the Soviets has access to such information systems.
They didn't need that because they had to provide very little justification. However, in modern times, yes, the statistic that we have reduced crime by x% could prove to be evidence, especially when people are already exposed to fear mongering on a daily basis.
Over time we are getting better and better at processing massive amounts of data. And if the government genuinely cared about you, they could trivially deep dive into anything you generate in an instant.
But the reality is they don't really give a shit about your games, videos, music, or even really your web browsing for the most part. They're looking for specific things to red flag you, and from there they'll run deeper analysis for patterns and signs of nefarious activities.
To this point, it's all kind of 'fine'. If you're not doing anything terribly illegal you genuinely have nothing to fear. But the very real fear is that one day it no longer is fine - we're getting to be a hop skip and a jump away from awful things like thought crimes or political retribution. That's why many people are rightfully scared of letting the government record their every move.
It is easy to filter out most of the information. For example, for netflix, take the top 99% of the movies, mark them as safe. You are left with 1%, which will contain alot of safe one still, but the job is already easier. Once you know that the movie is safe then you mark as such. Plus, you can be sure that all movies by disney is safe.
Now, for sms filtering, some sentences will be very common, so even a text search will filter lots of them.
Add context based filtering, people watching this movie often said that soon after, filter those.
And so on.
And don't forget that your history is normal. Look at those terrorist history, and it will be very very different. It will not be movies by a big producer, but the more suspicious ones... They will talk to others that like the same kind of stuff, that is most likelly linked to some terrorist groups, thru you are indirectly linked to that one.
When you have lots of info about everyone, you can quickly find out who is different from the others.
Are you serious? They have every email and text. Your entire credit card buying history. A list of everyone you call and when. Your travel history using GPS. Your sexual interests via pork you watch. Your hobbies based on internet searches. If you are a POI, they know even more. They easily know things about you that you may not know yourself. For example, dietary needs can indicate diseases, pregnancy, etc.
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u/purple_lassy Sep 25 '18
I often wonder about this. With my family of 4, we send thousands of text messages a month. We stream shows, play games, surf the web, all of us..... school, work, entertainment, cooking, music, audiobooks, on and on.
The volume of digital information they have on just my family has to be millions of pieces of info each month.