and distributed—including in people’s minds. How would we
control that?
One possibility, suggested by Mark Skilton, an information
systems professor at Warwick Business School in the U.K., is to
separate the right to possess your personal information from
the right to grant permission to others for its use. “New per-
sonal data services will evolve to track and better enable people
to manage their data while maintaining security and privacy,”
he predicts.
That could work for, say, Social Security numbers or other
keys to our identities. But much of the personal information over
which people worry involves interactions with other people.
Records of what we bought are also records of what other people
sold. Accounts of where we travel are also accounts of who trans-
ported us or rented us a room. If we can control data about our
purchases, can vendors also restrict what we say about their role
in the deal? If so then good luck, Yelp.
We get a glimpse of the pitfalls in this approach from the
implementation of the European Union’s Data Protection Reg-
ulation, intended to give individuals control over personally
identifiable information—“anything from a name, a photo,
an email address, bank details, your posts on social network-
ing websites, your medical information, or your computer’s IP
address,” according to the European Commission. Compliance
has proven challenging, especially for small businesses, which
have struggled to navigate the law’s bureaucratic complexities
far more than tech behemoths like Facebook and Google.
So creating an obstacle course of red tape may not be the most
effective way to go. Not unless we’re trying to entrench big firms
and create a full-employment act for lawyers, that is.
But such difficulties in implementation don’t erase legiti-
mate concerns about the collection and use of our data. Nobody
wants his identity stolen because a company can’t be bothered
to safeguard a massive store of hacker-bait. And political profiles
assembled from our online activities pose the distinct danger
of putting targets on our backs in an era when “partisans fixate
on the goal of defeating and even humiliating the opposition at
all costs,” as Stanford University’s Shanto Iyengar and Masha
Krupenkin wrote recently in Advances in Political Psychology.
What to do?
Enhanced liability for companies that compile sensitive data
but fail to adequately secure it seems appropriate. Anybody
who sees enough value in gathering such information that they
build a business model around it should be expected to take
measures to keep it safe. If they don’t, they should be prepared
to pay the price.
Still, we all need to be smart about distributing our informa-
tion and managing our own brands. Using social media is, of
course, far from a necessity. But if you do, there are ways to limit
the ability of tech industry voyeurs to look into your life.
Those Facebook ads become a lot more generic if you install
the Facebook Container Firefox add-on to isolate the social
media giant from the rest of your online activity. Anti-track-
ing extensions like Ghostery and any of numerous ad blockers
help you use the internet without leaving trails of breadcrumbs
wherever you go. So does favoring a privacy-respecting search
engine like DuckDuckGo over Google.
It’s also possible to smudge the outlines of your profile with
simple actions such as sharing your supermarket loyalty card—
if you choose to use one—with the friendly folks behind you in
line. The gas credits are nice, and let the marketers grapple with
your apparent ownership of ten cats and inexplicable thirst for
white zinfandel. After all, profiles of our lives are only as accu-
rate as the data fed into them.
Those of us who care about our privacy will always be torn
over what we should share with the world. There are no per-
fect solutions, but we can certainly make efforts to manage our
brands, and to make marketers doubt the reliability of their pro-
files by actively tainting them with false information.NEGATIVE:
Corporate Collection
of Big Data Makes
Your Life Better
DECLAN MCCULLAGH
AT THIS VERY moment in Silicon Valley, Seattle, New York, Zurich,
Tel Aviv, or Tokyo, a software engineer is puzzling out better
ways to use large amounts of personal data about you and bil-
lions of other people. Our engineer’s goal is to make your life a
little more convenient: Your phone will do a better job of search-
ing your photos, avoiding traffic, or suggesting books to read.
Private data collection done with the user’s consent isn’t
spying. It’s a way of figuring out what individual customers want
and need to serve them better.
These abilities are powered by a type of analysis called
machine learning. Its statistical techniques are capable of iden-
tifying patterns in data that previously required human intelli-
gence to discover. In general, the more data—sound clips, pho-
tographs, Uber rides, and so on—used for training the system,
the better its internal models will become and the more useful
the results will be. When executed well, it’s nearly magical.
When done poorly, well, we’re all very sorry you were asked if
you wanted to buy Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village, TenthREASON 27