Slippery Slopes
I’ve written in the past about the link between privacy and freedom. Most people get that there is a risk in the internet. Parents get that there is a some level of threat to their children. But it’s always the unexpected consequences of technology that people don’t easily grasp.
On March 13th of this year a company called Recorded Future posted a white paper on their blog. Part of the purpose of that paper was to flesh out the workings of what they called Temporal Analytics. It explains how analyzing links between web pages created the foundations for the huge company Google is today and how Recorded Future has developed an analyzing engine which does that. They call Googles BackRub system a simple search engine. It then goes into detail as to how their engine works and calls it Temporal Analytics. This is of interest because it’s the tip of an emerging iceberg. The thin end of a very big wedge. It is worth noting key investors in Recorded Futures include Google and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The goal of the company is to predict the future by mapping and analyzing momentum of information on the internet - in real time!. Sounds cool when you say ‘predict the future’.
Read the white paper here-–-a-white-paper-on-temporal-analytics and see how seriously these guys think they will be able to take historic data, mold it into a relevant data set, represent it some time/momentum linked way (like a graph) and predict what will happen next.
When you unpack the details the downside becomes more ominous.
Run your head through this scenario. A startup company called Social Intelligence has started using data mining techniques to find information about potential employees on the internet. Of course, it’s illegal to consider age, gender or religion when hiring somebody, but they can troll sites like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. In fact anything they can find on the internet to be fair. From there we step through data mining all that information, to mapping the information out, then analyzing it in as many ways as possible and finally projecting it ahead. Sounds kind of cool until you realize they’re talking about you and your livelihood. Listen to this pitch off an Earthweb article
What happens if one of your employees freaks out, comes to work and starts threatening coworkers with a samurai sword? You’ll be held responsible because all of the signs of such behavior were clear for all to see on public Facebook pages. That’s why you should scan every prospective hire and run continued scans on every existing employee.
That’s an official scare and fear based sale. But what are consequences here, does this mean I won’t get the job because of one mistake out drinking that got posted to Facebook somewhere? Will silly things done as a teenager be held against me for years to come like some kind of bad social credit record? Remember, they’re trolling the whole of the internet, it doesn’t even have to have been posted by you. And of course, the hiring check isn’t the only thing Social Intelligence does. They’ll keep track of all your current employes as well.
So you could get fired because a piece of software somewhere guessed you were about to go bad. A silent accusation you can’t challenge or even understand particularly well. Little chance of innocent before proven guilty. Not even an actual rule broken, just a prediction. From a piece of software. This is a whole paradigm shift about to happen, both these companies are real and running now. Data mining your personal digital life, like a video camera in your home recording your every move, creating predictions that could rob you of your job - and without a chance to question it, face it or have legal recourse to it. A company will simply make a judgement of your data profile versus the potential legal cost of firing you.
And the best part? You didn’t do anything wrong. Yet.
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