Shocking Info Google Has On You

"We would never let the government or a corporation put microphones in our homes" I guess these young kids don't remember regular telephones.

He draws the wrong conclusions from the size of the data set. He looks at the fact that he can download nearly 6 gigs of random trash from his history and thinks "OMG, they have so much data!" Do the math on how much data 6 gigs times a billion is to process. Does that sound like a manageable data set from an Orwellian police-state perspective?

It's not a manageable data set.

If they're going to store anything better that they store everything, because like the Library of Babel a library that contains everything contains nothing.

It would be far more worrying if your data set consisted of a single page neatly-typed Word document that looked like it was written by a human.

There's a fallacy in there, I forget which one. In short: just because /you/ cannot imagine a use for that much data, doesn't mean it's not useful.

Do you regularly open .EXE files in text editors, and determine them to be useless gibberish? You might be right, but not from the right perspective.

No, it's quite active. It's being used to serve ads, and share posts to you, that keep you coming back to look at more ads. It's being used to alter your perception of self, and of your friends, your happiness and even your political affiliation.

It's not a blob. It's distributed over a vast network of computers, constantly being processed to find various relations, to build a more accurate model of you, as a person, as an advertising target.

Tim

or current mobiles, which provide a mic and 1 or 2 cameras

NT

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete without posting, and things we do while not on Facebook and even when we're offline. It buys data about us from others. And it can infer even more: our sexual orientation, political beliefs, relationship status, drug use, and other personality traits -- even if we didn't take the personality test that Cambridge Analytica developed.

But for every article about Facebook's creepy stalker behavior, thousands of other companies are breathing a collective sigh of relief that it's Facebook and not them in the spotlight. Because while Facebook is one of the biggest players in this space, there are thousands of other companies that spy on and manipulate us for profit.