"Google knowing you better than your wife"
Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2014 12:13 am
It has become (technically speaking) entirely possible for everyone and everything to be tracked, recorded and...mined. Soon, the question will no longer be whether we have the technological skills and horsepower to do something, but why, when and where we should do it (never mind the thorny issue of 'who').
Who is in charge of all this data? Who controls where it goes? Who controls those that control? Who actually governs the Internet?
We may thus end up living inside their machines, or even worse, their machines live inside of us, like some kind of cochlear implant loaded with big data (hmm no comment here)
Can we really trust those new data-oil companies, those behemoths of smart-data-mining to not fall prey to the temptation of instrumentalizing us, to not use their armies of servers and their powerful algorithms for the most nefarious 'monetization' purposes, and to not use that very same information to tacitly or otherwise support the creation of perfect surveillance states?
The answer is: probably not - and this is not just a consequence of their capitalism-native obsession to maximize profit, but also of the fact that national laws supersede any rights that any of their global users may actually think they have.
subject to near-Orwellian laws such as the PATRIOT Act and FISA, which makes compliance with the laws...
Big data, big business, Big Brother, ...Watch what ya watch
Who is in charge of all this data? Who controls where it goes? Who controls those that control? Who actually governs the Internet?
We may thus end up living inside their machines, or even worse, their machines live inside of us, like some kind of cochlear implant loaded with big data (hmm no comment here)
Can we really trust those new data-oil companies, those behemoths of smart-data-mining to not fall prey to the temptation of instrumentalizing us, to not use their armies of servers and their powerful algorithms for the most nefarious 'monetization' purposes, and to not use that very same information to tacitly or otherwise support the creation of perfect surveillance states?
The answer is: probably not - and this is not just a consequence of their capitalism-native obsession to maximize profit, but also of the fact that national laws supersede any rights that any of their global users may actually think they have.
subject to near-Orwellian laws such as the PATRIOT Act and FISA, which makes compliance with the laws...
Big data, big business, Big Brother, ...Watch what ya watch