But as it gets easier to aggregate, don’t you think that increases the chance for abuse?
Maybe there are certain over the counter products that people with HIV or typically purchase, and maybe an life insurance company can regularly shed customers that meet the criteria.
If your point is that it’s not automatic and magic, I agree. And it certainly doesn’t become an issue overnight, but I do see the potential for abuse.
You know what? I don’t really care if the insurance company wants to charcge me $20 every time I order a pizza. I’m not thrilled about it, sure, but I don’t think it spells the end of Western civilization, or even contemporary standards of privacy. The only thing that really bugged me about that pizza-ordering senario (besides the implausability and the fear-mongering) was the clerk’s smarmy attitude and poor customer service skills. Take that away, and it’s just another possible PITA of modern life, not a doomsday senario. Frankly, I’d pay those surcharges just to have the delivery guy (who hopefully has access to the same level of technology) find my house using GPS instead of calling for directions every twenty minutes and letting the pizza get cold.
That is the key to how this whole thing falls apart. I understand both large confidential databases and statistics. I could certainly do an analysis to start correlating various behaviors or purchases with other things. Companies such as Wal-Mart have uncovered some interesting things with product purchases being correlated with things you might not expect such as liquor sales jumping rapidly as snowstorms approach and other little marketing tidbits and factoids.
Assuming I got a list of AIDS patients somehow (remember, that is a huge no-no but lets pretend) and if I also somehow got their over the counter pharmacy purchases (also a big ?), I might be able to find a correlation with certain products. That might be interesting from a population standpoint but it tells us nothing about individuals.
That is the key why this goes bad. You can either focus on one individual through sophistcated spying or you can focus on populations. The two are not the same. If we learn that the biggest customers of jumbo sized jars of Vaseline are promiscuous homosexual males and those people are the among the groups most likely to get AIDS, we still can’t use that for anything at the individual level. Day care personnel and lots of others may buy it as well.
Insurance is closely regulated in most states and I believe that actuaries are closely trained and monitored as well. They can’t just start sticking weird surcharges on a mismash of gays, grandmothers, and others without someone paying attention to their bills. That stuff is also calculated at group levels in general and they don’t really care about individuals because that is not how their business works. They have ways to know if someone has high cholesterol or even a smoker but they can’t reliably tell who is eating at fast food places 10 times a week. They can’t do anything until they can reliably match an individual with a behavior and this type of thing doesn’t allow that in any workable systems and not by a long-shot.
Confusion about what can and will be done at the group versus the individual level is what is important here. When you deal with groups, statistics are great. When you deal with individuals and apply something to them, facts are what matter and we are talking about things applied to individuals here.
Not only are the practicalities unworkable but the theory largely is as well.
:mad:
Grrrrr. Privacy laws are a pain!
You are describing the fire hose. They store that much search data per day. I bet when they query that data, and want to get results on it in the next day or so, they probably use a very big, expensive cluster or an even more expensive supercomputer. Otherwise they are probably looking at very small subsets of that data.
And as has been said before, merging the different database formats into a single meta-database makes the problem even worse. As computers get faster, this is less and less of a problem. The manpower problem still exists though.
Not to mention that you will still always have an incomplete set of information to go on. You may know what they have bought, but you do not know why, and what they did with it. If I buy aerosol whipped cream every weekend, am I:
A: A clown?
B: I inhaling the propellant?
C: I obsessive about whipped cream during sex?
D: All three at once?
Probably all three, but you really do not know much until you do work collecting data that is not currently stored in a computer, and probably not going to be by 2010.
In an age without prejudice, would be useless, except to hide things from the underage or the overly sensitive (who would be suffering greatly). In this happy Utopia, we will happily share the details of our pizza buying habits with anybody who cares to listen.
Seriously, if this kind of thing bothers you, you can turn off caller ID from your phone. My local taxi company uses this kind of service to remember my adress, and since they can just look it up on the Yellow Pages on the internet anyway, I think it’s great.
But there is a need for legislation that states clearly what you can and can’t do with your customer’s data, and it should be based on the privacy needs of the majority. I’m a typographer, not a lawyer, but I get the impression that laws are seriously lagging behind technology that’s moving by leaps and bounds.
That video was pretty funny. Call me paranoid, but I give someone else’s ph# at the grocery store to get my discount. And I don’t join things. Except the SDMB.
I’m basically off the grid, baby!
I read the Op. Basicly all he said was “click on this link”. I did click on that link, but the video wouldn’t work on this system, and thus likely on many systems. Thus many of us have no fucking idea of what the OP is babbling about.
It is a pizza order taker that inputs an order and the system starts shooting out all kinds of information about the person ordering. The pizza guy tells the customer what he can and can’t order based on personal health data and all kinds of other disparate info.
See if you can get it work on another system-- it’s pretty damn funny!
Ah…I see. Well, its basically a fictional run through of some guy ordering a pizza, with the pizza place using some sort of data base access program. It does a caller ID, then brings up some vital statistics about the caller…everything from past purchasing habits to health concerns (and extra charges if the guy orders pizza thats bad for him :)) to recent trips he’s made and credit security. Its pretty funny and I seriously doubt that pizza places in 2010 will have much of the information listed, as it would be a violation of a lot of existing laws, at least here in the US. Its a paranoids view of Big Brother gone wild, where all your personal information is available even to the guy that takes your pizza order…and I can see some survivalist types heading for the hills to bunker down at the very thought of some of this stuff.
Anyway, you should find a system it runs on (not sure what your prob was…seemed pretty basic a feed to me) and take a look. I was pretty amused myself.
-XT
Thanks all for replying. This system is pretty damn hot and up to date, but with where I work, the security is extremely high, thus that could be the problem.