Every successful social network will eventually consider selling your data. The temptation is simply too strong. Contrary to what you might think, the true value of what's in Facebook's database is not in the personal information — in other words, it's not really about your name, face, address, friends, family, place of work, school etc. In fact, if you're a person who doesn't really mind Facebook (or even the government) knowing these details about you, I wouldn't really blame you. Well, at least not as much as some privacy advocates would. Because the real danger is elsewhere.
In his 1951 science fiction novel Foundation, Isaac Asimov envisioned a discipline called psychohistory — a sort of advanced statistical sociology that allowed its practitioners to make highly accurate predictions about large populations over long time spans. In psychohistory, individuals and everyday events don't matter — there is too much uncertainty at that scale to make meaningful predictions. But when taken as a large population over time, people begin to exhibit patterns. Hari Seldon, the fictional creator of psychohistory, uses the equations of psychohistory to predict the collapse of the galactic civilization, followed by 30,000 years of barbarism. He then devises a secret, millennia-long plan to prevent this catastrophy.
You can see where I'm going with this. The database of a Facebook-sized social network contains an almost unimaginable amount of social data that can be plugged into predictive algorithms — algorithms that Asimov would have found fascinating. Companies already use this data for prediction — they can predict what type of products and services would be popular, and among what groups of people. Very soon, they'll be able to predict social trends, maybe even global trends. Maybe they can do so already. And if they can predict it, they can alter it. They can prevent things that were going to happen and trigger things that weren't going to happen. They can do it so subtly that they'll never have to force you to do anything. This is especially bad if the "they" here happens to be in government.
That's why personal information is not as important as you think it is. You see, no one really cares about who you are or what you do. What they really care about is what you think. And that's the information they gather — in the form of your 'likes', shares and the opinions you express in the form of comments. Someone who has the entire comment/like/share history of a sufficiently large number of people like you, could probably tell what you're going to do in the future better than you can. They'll do even better if all they have to do is make a prediction about the entire group, and not you individually. In fact, that's all they really want.
You see, no one — no corporation, no government — really cares about what you think or do, if you're the only person thinking or doing it. It only becomes important if a large number of people do it, and large numbers of people are more predictable than individuals.
No one's really going to come after you personally. It's so much smarter to see where people like you are heading and make that direction unpopular ahead of time.
So how do you prevent this? You can't shut down social networks — they're here to stay. There's no point starting a new social network that doesn't sell your data — it'll eventually succumb to the temptation and the pressure. But consider axiom #2 of psychohistory's two axioms:
Psychohistory
In his 1951 science fiction novel Foundation, Isaac Asimov envisioned a discipline called psychohistory — a sort of advanced statistical sociology that allowed its practitioners to make highly accurate predictions about large populations over long time spans. In psychohistory, individuals and everyday events don't matter — there is too much uncertainty at that scale to make meaningful predictions. But when taken as a large population over time, people begin to exhibit patterns. Hari Seldon, the fictional creator of psychohistory, uses the equations of psychohistory to predict the collapse of the galactic civilization, followed by 30,000 years of barbarism. He then devises a secret, millennia-long plan to prevent this catastrophy.
You can see where I'm going with this. The database of a Facebook-sized social network contains an almost unimaginable amount of social data that can be plugged into predictive algorithms — algorithms that Asimov would have found fascinating. Companies already use this data for prediction — they can predict what type of products and services would be popular, and among what groups of people. Very soon, they'll be able to predict social trends, maybe even global trends. Maybe they can do so already. And if they can predict it, they can alter it. They can prevent things that were going to happen and trigger things that weren't going to happen. They can do it so subtly that they'll never have to force you to do anything. This is especially bad if the "they" here happens to be in government.
That's why personal information is not as important as you think it is. You see, no one really cares about who you are or what you do. What they really care about is what you think. And that's the information they gather — in the form of your 'likes', shares and the opinions you express in the form of comments. Someone who has the entire comment/like/share history of a sufficiently large number of people like you, could probably tell what you're going to do in the future better than you can. They'll do even better if all they have to do is make a prediction about the entire group, and not you individually. In fact, that's all they really want.
You see, no one — no corporation, no government — really cares about what you think or do, if you're the only person thinking or doing it. It only becomes important if a large number of people do it, and large numbers of people are more predictable than individuals.
No one's really going to come after you personally. It's so much smarter to see where people like you are heading and make that direction unpopular ahead of time.
Open books
So how do you prevent this? You can't shut down social networks — they're here to stay. There's no point starting a new social network that doesn't sell your data — it'll eventually succumb to the temptation and the pressure. But consider axiom #2 of psychohistory's two axioms:
- The population whose behavior is modeled should be sufficiently large
- The population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses
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