You have to wade through a lot to reach the good news at the end of Time reporter Joel Stein’s article about “data mining”—or at least data collection and use—in the online world. There’s some fog right there: what he calls “data mining” is actually ordinary one-to-one correlation of bits of information, not mining historical data to generate patterns that are predictive of present-day behavior. (See my data mining paper with Jeff Jonas to learn more.) There is some data mining in and among the online advertising industry’s use of the data consumers emit online, of course.
Next, get over Stein’s introductory language about the “vast amount of data that’s being collected both online and off by companies in stealth.” That’s some kind of stealth if a reporter can write a thorough and informative article in
Time magazine about it. Does the moon rise “in stealth” if you haven’t gone outside at night and looked at the sky? Perhaps so.
Now take a hard swallow as you read about Senator John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) plans for government regulation of the information economy.
Kerry is about to introduce a bill that would require companies to make sure all the stuff they know about you is secured from hackers and to let you inspect everything they have on you, correct any mistakes and opt out of being tracked. He is doing this because, he argues, “There’s no code of conduct. There’s no standard. There’s nothing that safeguards privacy and establishes rules of the road.”
Securing data from hackers and letting people correct mistakes in data about them are kind of
equally opposite things. If you’re going to make data about people available to them, you’re going to create opportunities for other people—it won’t even take hacking skills, really—to impersonate them, gather private data, and scramble data sets. Continue reading →
Jeff Jonas has published an important post: “Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Food!”
More than you probably realize, your mobile device is a digital sensor, creating records of your whereabouts and movements:
Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not. If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters. Using Wi-Fi? It is accurate below 10 meters.
The process of deploying this data to markedly improve our lives is underway. A friend of Jonas’ says that space-time travel data used to reveal traffic tie-ups shaves two to four hours off his commute each week. When it is put to full use, “the world we live in will fundamentally change. Organizations and citizens alike will operate with substantially more efficiency. There will be less carbon emissions, increased longevity, and fewer deaths.”
This progress is not without cost:
Continue reading →
Via Jeff Jonas, who oh-so-carefully assessed the treatment he received in Stephen Baker’s book The Numerati, I came across this NPR interview with Baker.
In the latter part of the interview, Baker discusses pretty accurately Jonas’ dissent from the passion for predictive data mining in the national security world. That dissent was given expression in the paper Jeff and I wrote, “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining.”
The data intelligentsia are an interesting subject for a book, of course – it looks
The Numerati may have a lot of similarities to Robert O’Harrow’s No Place to Hide – and the NPR interview is interesting. But what makes it notable is Baker’s economic literacy. Or, more accurately, his lack of economic literacy.
Now, I’m not an economist either, so I’ll stand for correction in the comments (actual economists preferred, not just people with strong opinions, please).
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.