Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanthe
There's going to come a point, though, where the amount of data collected outweighs its usefulness. Right now the companies and alphabet agencies are in the first flush of lust with all the data that's out there for the taking. Sooner or later, though, they're going to realize that there's much more chaff than wheat in all that data they've got stored, and they can cross-file and cross-check it all they want, but its never going to reveal our inner selves to them. All they are going to get are the surface details, that we probably would have revealed anyway, if only asked.
|
I doubt that. It's scary what you can learn about a person just from the movement data from their cellphone -- in 2009 a German politician sued the government for his cellphone metadata for the last 6 months and won. He then published the results online -- in an interactive map. You could see where he went shopping (and when), when he got up and when he went to sleep, the way he took to work, where his friends and family live (just by cross-checking public records of places he frequented) and so on. You can probably find out more about a person that way than anyone would suspect -- and that's just the metadata (the same stuff the NSA collected from millions of Americans).
See the map here (the data is "blurred", so not as exact as it really is in order to protect the person's privacy):
http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-vorratsdaten (EDIT: This URL leads to one of Germay's leading and most respected weekly magazines, so it's as safe as anything to click on]
You can make very educated guesses about who's a friend, who's a co-worker, who's a romantic partner and who someone is having an affair with just by looking at the call times and lengths without needing to actually listen to the calls. It's easier than you would suspect.
Add to that mail & Facebook correspondence (who, when, where & even what), the Amazon purchase history, your Google searches and your entire web browsing history (as stored by Facebook and now Amazon) and you'll know more about a person than even their spouse does.
So, no, it's not likely that this data will be useless. I used to think that too until I've worked with a team who did data warehousing and analysis for a big company. They could guess gender, sexual orientation, age group, income group and even place of living based on purchase history with a shocking degree of accuracy (well over 95%) where non of this data was provided by the customer.
Matt