Wrt your pub analogy, if the pub was tracking when you entered the premises and what you tended to order, they could use that information to provide better service, and use info on your spending habits to tailor offers to you.
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Should people have proprietary interests in their personal data?
- Thread starter sledger
- Start date
StephenZA
Well-known member
I'm not denying the usefulness, "where everybody knows your name.".... its more about knowing what they are doing with it; and unless I`m very close to the waitress she is unlikely to know any personal data about me, beyond what is required for ordering my beer. Unless the pub wants to start matchmaking and bring in the sort of girls I like!
sledger
Spanish_Vicente
I don't disagree, but so far as the law in the EU is concerned all of the things you mention are "personal data", and their use is regulated as such. Like you allude to, "data that can be used to identify you" is an ever-expanding concept, which raises questions about the normative value of the concept itself for the reasons you state. It's another limb of the property rights in personal data debate, but there's definitely an argument that the whole notion of personal data should be done away with, and instead of targeting laws at information that identifies individuals, instead they should be targeted at specific types of data uses instead.
sledger
Spanish_Vicente
Yeah, I am sure this is the attitude of many, and I don't mean to cause offence when I say this, but this is ultimately very naive.
Individually many of the pieces of information Facebook collects about you might be benign, but when collated and cross referenced with other data the possibilities are incredibly extensive. The information you provide Facebook has been shown to be capable of identifying people's sexuality, political and religious affiliations, credit worthiness, health problems, and other sensitive info, despite none of it ever being volunteered to Facebook itself. It is all inferred based on predictive analytics, but is done with a very high degree of sophistication and accuracy. If this stuff was used only for the purposes of advertising it would maybe be ok, but it's not, and nobody really knows what happens to this info after Facebook shares it with other parties. In the wrong hands, this info could really be used to screw you over, badly.
Similarly, despite the above predicitions about a person's identity usually being accurate, they are still just that, predictions, and they can be wrong. An oft used example is as follows:
Person A goes on Facebook, and uses the messenger function to speak to Person B about the fact that Person B has cancer.
Person A then goes on Google and searches for life insurance for Person C (who, let's say is an elderly relative).
Facebook and Google then collate this information (i.e. the fact that Person A has used the terms "cancer" and "life insurance"), and wrongly identify that Person A has a serious illness and is looking for health insurance, and is thus a bad credit risk.
This information then ends up in the hand of an insurer or a bank or something, who then ramp up their premiums massively for Person A, and Person A is totally boned, completely unfairly and through no fault of their own.
Edit: As Stephen has said, none of this is to deny the usefulness of what personal data can be used for. It's just to highlight the fact that there are some really concerning possibilities out there, and that it's not "all just about advertising".
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Spark
Global Moderator
I remember that story a few weeks back about the image recognition algorithm that could predict whether you were gay or not. It was the source of much amusement, mostly because it didn't work that well and even then only with white people, but that kind of thing is pretty disturbing IMO.
Ausage
Well-known member
Our digital footprint can't really be erased. The systems upon which the internet is built store this information as part of how they work. You just need someone (or someones) smart enough to connect the right dots. Short of new technology completely changing the way computers and data storage works (not impossible ofc) we'll continue to be at the mercy of companies/people using the data responsibly. That's before you even get to people wanting services that require their identifiable data to be stored in a way that identifies them.
I think finding ways of stopping our data being stored is a dead end. We're better off ensuring it's used responsibly.
I think finding ways of stopping our data being stored is a dead end. We're better off ensuring it's used responsibly.
sledger
Spanish_Vicente
Yeah I am of a similar view.
What is really unhelpful at the moment is the way the law uses terminology that is disconnected to reality and creates unrealistic expectations. Particularly things like "anonymisation" of data, which is basically impossible, and the infamous "right to be forgotten", which, due to the Web never forgetting, is a complete misnomer.
Even if we accept that it is responsible usage that we need to target though this is still massively complicated. In worst case scenarios, people won't even know who is collecting their data, who them are sharing it with, what all these parties are doing with it. How can that individual possibly bring an action against another party for non-appropriate use of their data if they do not even know who holds that data?
To take a (hopefully) hypothetical example. If James were to know the name of a CW user, and wrote it down on a piece of paper, along with that user's IP address and other metadata gathered by the site, and sold it to some Russian gang or something, how would that user ever even know about it in the first place, let alone do anything about it?
Ausage
Well-known member
Agreed. This forum really doesn't understand Life University.
