I’ve previously written about the sheep-goat dating website, ovicap.org, which I use as the paradigm example of a cyberspace application, you know, set up a website that connects A to B, gives free access to A and B, and makes money by selling ad space and A and B’s data to anyone with money to pay.
This has always been an “exciting” model, by which I mean enormously profitable and dubious at the same time. There’s certainly more than a little willful suspension of disbelief behind it, it requires that the user happily give away enormous amounts of personal data on the whisker-thin illusion that the honest and upstanding proprietors of the website (and harvesters of the data) will … treasure it.
Yes, well, treasure it they do, but likely mostly in the direct sense of for the value it provides as valuable data for sale, not the kind of treasure that pirates would protect in a chest or a lockbox or what have you.
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This could easily become a tirade on how we ought know better than to assume data won’t be skillfully aggregated and bundled and sold (or stolen) by the malicious vagabonds of the internet who are masquerading as high-tech robinhoods … but I’m just not in the mood for this sort of tirade.
I also don’t want to make this into a discourse on whatever underlying structures in our brains make us indifferent to the idea that we can be tracked for profit — in my case, the wetware anomaly is that I don’t believe anyone would care to do so simply because my life strikes me as really boring, and I can’t fathom someone else finding the interest to surveil me or, for that matter, anyone wanting to buy that surveillance data.
But then again machines aren’t people, they’ll do whatever they’re programmed to do, including collecting and collating information on boring people like me. And people can themselves be similarly motivated when the ends are exceptionally high value, witness the Russian meddling and Cambridge Analytica and so on.
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What’s most interesting to me about the recent rediscovery of massive data harvesting on A-connecting-B internet sites is the larger question of how to gather and use data in a safer and more responsible way, and not what the immediate repercussions of these sudden revelations may be, e.g., the wholesale slaughter of the purveyors of these websites by that particularly horrible of horribles — “regulatory overreach.”
This strikes me as a three-part analysis, which I want to briefly lay out because I think it will likely serve as a framework for later posts, particularly posts on the question of whether data harvesting in a safe and ethical way — “protected” data harvesting — can be applied to startups and entrepreneurship, where companies succeed or fail depending upon the flow of data between the team members and, therefore, the need for better control/flow of data is particularly acute.
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As to Part I, as a threshold question we need to decide whether to accept or reject the idea that massive data harvesting is a good thing, not necessarily in general, but certainly for particularized ends. This isn’t a trivial point, because the history of massive data gathering about people isn’t a happy one, and these bad facts can’t be dismissed as something from purely antediluvian times. See, for example, the interesting (!) history of IBM’s involvement with Hitler’s final solution, where IBM provided the punch card machines and system for gathering the eugenic data on the human populations under Germany’s dominion, and much else besides — note this history intimately (and ironically?) involves IBM’s chief Thomas Watson, whose name is now given to IBM’s major product, the “Watson” AI system. See Wikipedia — IBM And The Holocaust.
Now on the other hand, data gathering can have very useful purposes, a point that’s emphasized when trying to deal with pandemics or solving human wants and so on. In 2002 I wrote an article arguing that DNA testing could be used for the admirable purpose of establishing identity — “ethnicity” but without the negative eugenic trappings that latter term invokes. See Journal of Biolaw and Business — Bioethics and the commodification of biotechnology. At the time the reviewers forced me to add a large number of declamatory statements about the dangers of such testing, but of course now you can’t go an hour without seeing ads for this kind of datagathering on the Teevee. In other words, times change and some datagathering turns out to be more benign than we thought (although see NY Post — Schumer Warns About DNA Testing and other, far more erudite citations).
The conclusion we can draw is that datagathering of people data is a balancing act, one that weighs positive results again the loss of privacy and abuse of the data. Hardly a surprising statement, but again it’s rather revelatory in light of advances in computers and AI and non-regulation of A-connecting-B websites (Facebook, Google, etc.), all of which have enabled data collection far beyond what we imagined when we first embraced the internet. Give it the moniker “extreme data-gathering” if you like.
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Given this balancing act, consider the Part II question to be: how do we ensure appropriate privacy? Easy question to ask, hard question to resolve, and I’m certainly not claiming superhuman abilities in this regard.
That said, here’s a three-part division of possibilities: 1) rely on regulatory solutions; 2) rely on technology solutions; and, 3) stop harvesting data.
Since this post is already rather long, I’ll defer the discussion of these alternatives to a separate upcoming discussion.