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NHS patient confidentiality broken SIX times a day!

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ResearchKit — Empowering doctors, researchers, and now you

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Rating taken to its extreme

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Another episode from "Black Mirror" that interrogates the use of our data: with all the trails we leave, it will be possible to recreate our personality...

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This is an excerpt from an episode of the series "Black Mirror". In the near future, we'll be able to share our memories. The woman with a scarf is an employee of an insurance company, trying to find out what happened during a car crash. She questions a dentist and we can see on the screen his memory.

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Black Mirror - Crocodile "Dentist Scene" [TR-Subst]

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LIKE OIL LEADS TO GLOBAL WARMING...

DATA LEADS TO SOCIAL COOLING

If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.

Big Data is supercharging this effect.

This could limit your desire to take risks or exercise free speech.

Over the long term these 'chilling effects' could 'cool down' society.

This is how it works:

There are stars behind the cloud:

Databrokers compare your data to the data of people they know more about. By comparing the patterns they try to guess the likelihood of thousands of details that you may never have disclosed. These are actual examples:

Religion

Rape victim

Into dieting

Into gardening

Number of online friends

Number of real friends

IQ

Political views

Had abortion

Gullibility

Projected sexual orientation

Real sexual orientation

Reads magazines on travel

Reads books on travel

Planning to have a baby

Communication device preference

Has house plants

Neuroticism

Openness

Date of Birth

Into Fashion

Parents divorced before the age of 21

Economic stability

Potential inheritor

Extraversion

Agreeableness

Year house built

Smoker in the household

Has 'senior needs'

Has 'diabetic focus'

Easily addictable

Physical frailty

Gun owner

Adult 'empty nester'

Education level

Runs marathons

Into Elvis Memorabilia

(And that these algorithms are often biased, and built on bad data.)

In the news

Your health insurer may collect intimate data about your lifestyle, race and more.

This has good and bad sides.

Social Cooling is a name for the long-term negative side effects of living in a reputation economy:

1. A culture of conformity

Have you ever hesitated to click on a link because you thought your visit might be logged, and it could look bad?

More and more people feel this pressure, and they are starting to apply self-censorship.

2. A culture of risk-aversion

When doctors in New York were given scores this had unexpected results.

Doctors that tried to help advanced cancer patients had a higher mortality rate, which translated into a lower score.

Doctors that didn't try to help were rewarded with high scores, even though their patients died prematurely.
Rating systems can create unwanted incentives, and increase pressure to conform to a bureaucratic average.

3. Increased social rigidity

Digital reputation systems are limiting our ability and our will to protest injustice.

In China each adult citizen is getting a government mandated " social credit score". This represents how well behaved they are, and is based on crime records, what they say on social media, what they buy, and even the scores of their friends.

If you have a low score you can't get a government job, visa, cheap loan, or even a nice online date.
Social pressure is the most powerful and most subtle form of control.

As our weaknesses are mapped..

Yes, we've had credit ratings before. But this is a whole new scale, with an incredible level of automation, integration and accessibility.

The big philosophical question:

Are we becoming more well behaved, but less human?

What does it mean to be free in a world where surveillance is the dominant businessmodel?

The big economic question:

Are we undermining our creative economy?

In a creative economy the people who dare to be different are our greatest resource.

The big societal question:

Will this impact our ability to evolve as a society?

Yesterday's fight for equality by a minority is today's widely accepted norm. But will minority views still flourish?

The solution?

Social Cooling is subtle

The pollution of our social environment is invisible to most people, just like air pollution was at first.

Social Cooling is complex

It cannot be solved by politicians, citizens, entrepreneurs or scientists on their own.

Public awareness is still very low.

It took 40 years to get the problems with oil on the agenda, and 80 years to get to where we are now.
We can't take that long with Social Cooling.

In the next 10 years we will need to spread a more mature and nuanced perception of data and privacy.

As pressure to be perfect rises we will learn what privacy really is:

Can we still forgive and forget?

When algorithms judge everything we do, we need to protect the right to make mistakes.

When everything is remembered as big data, we need the right to have our mistakes forgotten.

In our data driven world..

Help spread the word

These are privacy-friendly sharing buttons.

Sources & further reading

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Social Cooling - big data's unintended side effect

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This is how it works: There are stars behind the cloud: Databrokers compare your data to the data of people they know more about. By comparing the patterns they try to guess the likelihood of thousands of details that you may never have disclosed.

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Companies are making money from our personal data

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The future of social media.(Rating everyone)

https://youtu.be/epI5r0_T_lE

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Highlights of Zuckerberg's testimony to Congress

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Highlights of Zuckerberg's testimony to Congress

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Highlights: Mark Zuckerberg's Congress grilling

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Mark Zuckerberg: “I’m really sorry that this happened”

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There are plenty more like Cambridge Analytica. I know - I've used the data | Poppy Noor

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In a world where companies have a monopoly over our eyeballs, the Facebook scandal is the tip of the iceberg , says the Guardian columnist Poppy Noor

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f you want evidence that US intelligence agencies aren't losing surveillance abilities because of the rising use of encryption by tech companies, look no further than the testimony on Tuesday by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper.

As the Guardian reported, Clapper made clear that the internet of things - the many devices like thermostats, cameras and other appliances that are increasingly connected to the internet - are providing ample opportunity for intelligence agencies to spy on targets, and possibly the masses. And it's a danger that many consumers who buy these products may be wholly unaware of.

"In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," Clapper told a Senate panel as part of his annual "assessment of threats" against the US.

Clapper is actually saying something very similar to a major study done at Harvard's Berkman Center released last week. It concluded that the FBI's recent claim that they are "going dark" - losing the ability to spy on suspects because of encryption - is largely overblown, mainly because federal agencies have so many more avenues for spying. This echoes comments by many surveillance experts, who have made clear that, rather than "going dark", we are actually in the "golden age of surveillance".

Privacy advocates have known about the potential for government to exploit the internet of things for years. Law enforcement agencies have taken notice too, increasingly serving court orders on companies for data they keep that citizens might not even know they are transmitting. Police have already been asking Google-owned company Dropcam for footage from cameras inside people's homes meant to keep an eye on their kids. Fitbit data has already been used in court against defendants multiple times.

But the potential for these privacy violations has only recently started reaching millions of homes: Samsung sparked controversy last year after announcing a television that would listen to everything said in the room it's in and in the fine print literally warned people not to talk about sensitive information in front of it.

While Samsung took a bunch of heat, a wide array of devices now act as all-seeing or all-listening devices, including other television models, Xbox Kinect, Amazon Echo and GM's OnStar program that tracks car owners' driving patterns. Even a new Barbie has the ability to spy on you - it listens to Barbie owners to respond but also sends what it hears back to the mothership at Mattel.

Then there are the rampant security issues with the internet of things that allow hackers - whether they are criminal, government or something in between - to access loads of data without any court order, like the creeps who were eavesdropping on baby monitors of new parents. Just a few weeks ago, a security researcher found that Google's Nest thermostats were leaking users' zipcodes over the internet. There's even an entire search engine for the internet of things called Shodan that allows users to easily search for unsecured webcams that are broadcasting from inside people's houses without their knowledge.

While people voluntarily use all these devices, the chances are close to zero that they fully understand that a lot of their data is being sent back to various companies to be stored on servers that can either be accessed by governments or hackers.

While Clapper's comments are generating new publicity for this privacy worry, the government has known about the potential to exploit these devices for a long time. The then CIA director David Petraeus made clear that intelligence agencies would use theinternet of things to spy on people back in 2012, saying:

Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters - all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.

As Wired put it, Petraeus was expressing excitement the CIA would soon be able spy on you through your dishwasher.

Author and persistent Silicon Valley critic Evgeny Morozov summed up the entire problem with the internet of things and "smart" technology in a tweet last week:

In case you are wondering what "smart" - as in "smart city" or "smart home" - means:

Surveillance
Marketed
As
Revolutionary
Technology
- Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) February 1, 2016

While internet-connected devices are not going away - it's a certainty they will only get more prevalent - it's important that companies make them as secure as the end-to-end encryption the FBI director loves to complain about, and that we press the government to enact strict new rules to prevent our privacy from being invaded thanks to the weakest link among televisions or dolls or thermostats that line billions of homes around the world.

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The government just admitted it will use smart home devices for spying | Trevor Timm

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f you want evidence that US intelligence agencies aren't losing surveillance abilities because of the rising use of encryption by tech companies, look no further than the testimony on Tuesday by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper.