吃瓜大本营

Last week I posted about 鈥淏ig Data鈥� and how it is being used to discover new facts about people, to sift and sort them based on subtle patterns, to flag them as 鈥渞isks鈥� in this field or that, to predict their behavior, and to manipulate them for maximum profit.

Of course, humans are not sheep, and we don鈥檛 sit still when things like this happen to us. We perceive what is happening, and we change our behavior in response. We react. The effects of Big Data on privacy and society will be a game of three-dimensional chess, not checkers.

Humans are intensely social animals, keenly aware of when and how we are being observed and perceived by others. And our awareness of this game will only be intensified as big data is democratized鈥攁s it is used and adopted by individuals for or other purposes. We鈥檙e likely to see the emergence of easy-to-use applications that make data mining available to all, and the spread of big data intuitions as people grasp what鈥檚 possible.

All this will only make us more conscious of our role as subjects of these techniques.

One of the powerful things that big data analytics can do is to count up large numbers of tiny actions and behaviors, and draw big-picture conclusions from them. Anyone who has observed the amazing effectiveness of Bayesian spam filters (see this of how they work; personally I use ) cannot but be impressed by the power of mindless number crunching to ferret out meaning. Perhaps a more cautionary example is Facebook, which keeps track of your clicks to in your various Friends. A developer has written that will let you see the numerical scores Facebook has calculated for how much you stalk each of your Friends (as the site says, 鈥淭his is really interesting, but may be embarrassing to you鈥�).

It鈥檚 a small thing, but after I heard about that function, I started getting kind of self-conscious each time I clicked on various Friends鈥� updates. Not for any particular reason, it鈥檚 just that now I knew I was being watched in that way.

Given all the uses to which big data could be put, this is just the tip of a potentially very large iceberg. Over time, as the ramifications of big data analytics sink in, people will likely become much more conscious of the ways they鈥檙e being tracked, and the chilling effects on all sorts of behaviors could become considerable. Ultimately, if we imagine current trends pushed to their limits, we get the nightmare scenario: the consistent tracking and uncovering of such unconscious or semi-conscious behaviors across our lives, combined with our innate social self-consciousness, turning us into quivering, neurotic beings living in a psychologically oppressive world in which we鈥檙e constantly aware that our every smallest move is being charted, measured, and evaluated against the like actions of millions of other people鈥攁nd then used to judge us in unpredictable ways.

Of course, as I said humans are not passive and will undoubtedly come up with many creative ways of subverting such a system. But that is an arms race we don鈥檛 want to enter. I have no idea how likely such a scenario is, but regardless it鈥檚 just another reason why we need good privacy protections.

Update:
Subsequent post on Big Data: Revolution or Overhyped Fad?