Tag: micookie

Over the weekend, chatting with friends, I heard myself going off on what I imagine sounded like a paranoid fantasy fuelled privacy rant. But it stems from my own confusion about what it means for so much data to be out there about us, and whether the paranoid fantasy bit actually relates to:

– the extent to which folk would want to collect and process that data, and use it “against” me, as an individual;
– the extent to which data from disparate sources can be reconciled;
– the idea that all manner and variety of data about me is being collected anyway;
– the fact that all manner and variety of data about me could in principle be being collected.

So here are some more bits and pieces…

We all know that Tesco pioneered the use of loyalty cards for personalised customer marketing and store optimisation (eg The Tesco Data Business (Notes on “Scoring Points”)) and maybe that they track you round a store (or do they track your face?!), and now it seems that as well as supplementing their petrol stations with ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) systems (I assume their garages are equipped with them? Some of their car parks are…) they’ll be using face scanning Amscreen Point of Sale advertising screens to profile folk based on gender and age. (It’s possibly just easier to recognise someone by their face or phone and then lookup their gender and age; and economic circumstances; and etc etc?!)

Adrian Short has some further comments here… When does face scanning tip over into the full-time surveillance society?

See the ad? Face recgonition as commodity service?

I don’t really know how concerning this is – folk I meet regularly recognise me, so what does it matter if machines universally and ubiquitously recognise me? Should I be concerned that my face is essentially third party cookie, at least for unique ID purposes, that can be identified by anyone whose servers hook into a particular video or image feed?

And presumably things like my payment cards, and car number plate, and postcode, and etc etc can effectively be treated as third party cookies too in a similar respect of unique or group identification? (What should we call such things? I, me, my cookies…? icookies?! Or to tie into the notion of #midata, micookies?)

And should I be fearful that such companies buy and sell data about me via ad exchanges and cookie matching services?

Surely companies using #midata can help me make better decisions, nudging me in to taking courses of action that are good for me?

So should we care? Should we care what data’s out there in the wild about me? Should we care that a shedload of #midata may actually be publicly available data, not least through cookie tracking, and micookie traces?

Should we care that services like Wonga.com may be making use of that data to make decisions about me, as described in Leaky data: How Wonga makes lending decisions (read it, it’s an interesting read…).

And should we care that the decisions made on the basis of such publicly available but who knows what data are probably so algorithmically complex that there is no transparency or rationale in how or why such decisions are actually made the way they are? (See for example Transparent Predictions, Tal Zarsky, University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2013, No. 4, 2013.)

Not paranoid, just confused, and not really able to think any of this through…

POS an example of where Facebook’s at wrt automated face recognition around the end of 2013: DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification