IMHO the correct way to approach this is to not allow the insurance companies, police, etc., to use data in such a manner. Pass laws saying that people can’t be charged higher amounts for health insurance because their second cousin had a bout with cancer. Being a communist agitator isn’t illegal so if the police show up to your house with a warrant for that, the correct response would be to find out which judge signed the warrant and go through proper channels to try to get that judge, and the officers who sought out the warrant, removed from their positions. Other examples would be similar.
Putting aside the privacy issue, there’s also the property ownership issue.
Your personal data can be viewed as your property. It’s your life after all that the data is being obtained from. But companies are buying and selling your personal data without your permission and without compensating you for its use. The fact that they’re buying and selling it means they recognize its commercial value. But you’re not getting any money out of the transactions.
That’s nice in theory but it’s unrealistic. In the real world, people get targeted for harassment because they’re part of some group which doesn’t have popular support. Democracy can protect the rights of the majority but it doesn’t always do a good job protecting the rights of a minority.
Laws are at best guidelines for people without the power to laugh in the laws face. We live in a society where there is absolutely no consequence whatsoever for those with power. You can pass any law you like, and the poor or timid will listen, but your law means nothing when the people who are supposed to enforce that law are too afraid of the people they’re supposed to enforce it against to do anything. We’re waaaaay past the point of rule of law for anyone with access to sufficient funds.
Okay! So we’ll still charge you extra, but not because of your second cousin. We’ll just invent a publically expressed reason that’stotally not because we know you’re higher risk.
Or, we’ll just laugh at the regulator and say “So hit me with a fine. We can afford it.”
…all this magic from your indefinite detention cell without trial?
And communist was just a humorous example. They’re far more likely to call you a terrorist, because it’s always a-okay to do anything you want to a terrorist. Or did you never hear of the Patriot act?
Are you ok with not getting a job based on your medical history or affiliation in certain groups? Or paying higher insurance premiums because there is a photo of you drinking in a bar? Or being denied a mortgage or lease because of your political views? Or a dating site evaluating your income potential?
It’s not really about companies marketing to you more effectively. It’s more about people accessing data you don’t want them to have, making decisions for you without your consent or knowledge.
I don’t dispute that it *could *happen - but as I can’t imagine what Safeway would gain from the exercise ( which will only tell them the names of people who have registered the cars in the parking lot, not the names of the people shopping or what they bought). I suspect someone has mixed the story up somewhere, as there have been cases where sales tax officials wrote down the NY license plate numbers of cars parked in NJ malls and sent letters to the owners saying that they may owe NY sales taxes for purchases made that day. Here’s a link to Google books- I know there are newspaper articles about the practice but haven’t been able to find the correct search terms.
You lose. I’m the OP and I’m not worried about loss of privacy and I’m 76 years old. I’m also old enough to remember phone books, a wonderfully useful tool. It was misused occasionally by cold-callers, of course, but the benefits outweighed the drawbacks. By far. I think that the imaginary horror stories illustrate how thin the line is between legitimate concerns about information being misused and paranoia. It is everyone’s responsibility to keep that line in mind and keep your mind from going over the cliff. The world is not a frighteningly dangerous place unless you insist on being afraid.
I do think it’s worth understanding how machine learning has changed the game.
On the advertising front, we think of indiscriminate ads cooked up by copywriters that are relatively easy to ignore. I see the new iDroid 95 on the side of a bus, I can ignore that easily enough. The next level is that they target college educated 40 year old white males – still, my decision. But let’s take it a step further. Let’s say the advertiser knows that my fine is 2 years old, or that I’m frustrated with it. Let’s say they know that I typically make purchasing decisions over a 2-3 month period. Let’s say they know that I drink a little too much bourbon on Thursday nights. They can construct an advertisement pattern targeted specifically at me, to build a campaign of distinctive ads that culminate in getting hit with something at midnight on Thursday after being slowly groomed for 3 months. If I buy that product then, was it really my decision? Or was I manipulated?
Now imagine that no human is making any of those decisions – no human knows that I drink bourbon on Thursdays, no human knows that I’m slow to make decisions and need to be groomed over months, no human even knows that I’m a 40 year old college educated white male. Instead, a metric ton of browsing data is fed into a machine learning algorithm that is able to produce that perfect advertising campaign just for me without anyone really understanding what it’s doing or why.
I’m not so proud of my own decision making abilities to realize that I’m pretty helpless against that level of sophistication. Now expand advertising to voting – can I be manipulated in the same way by a machine learning algorithm to prefer a specific candidate? Probably. Can my obscure browsing data be used to determine whether or not I’m a good credit risk? Absolutely. Can an employer determine if I’m the sort of guy who’s willing to work 60 hour weeks for no additional pay and pass over me if I’m not? Yep.
You can think of these as paranoia but I think that’s a bit naive given the current state of machine learning tech. The only roadblock is whether or not someone is willing to do any of those things, and has the money to implement it.
If you’re going to ask this question, then you have to ask the larger question - is any decision EVER your decision? Are you going to suggest that there has been no input into any of your decisions? And is all of that input wrong, misleading, manipulative? We all make our decisions based on what we believe to be our best interests. Sometimes, we’re well aware of the advertising or the input that has led us to those points. Sometimes, we’re unaware of it. Still, at some point, you say you’re going to buy new shoes or a hat or a car. Why that one? An infinite number of reasons, most of which aren’t even remotely available to your conscious reasoning. So what? You want the shoes? Buy them. You don’t want them? Don’t. This line of thinking that we are just zombies, driven by the “hidden persuaders” and completely at their mercy surely sells us short as influencers of our own destinies.
I’ve asked this plenty of times and what it always comes down to is the big bad ends up being…targeted ads. Which frankly makes me care even less.
Persuasion is a thing, though. You can persuade people to change their minds, to do things they didn’t originally want to do. You can persuade your employees to work harder by appealing to their sense of being part of a team or tribe, for instance.
Is an employee who ships an extra 20 units after a good pep talk a zombie, driven by hidden persuaders? We tend not to think of it that way. After all, not all employees will be persuaded to work harder, so surely those that do are at some point making a decision to do so.
Now imagine two companies with identical employees. One company gives a conventional persuasive presentation and increases output in 10% of their employees. The other company feeds petabytes of data into a machine learning algorithm and is able to give individualize computer generated persuasive presentations to their employees, thus increasing output in 90% of their workforce.
Is there any difference between those two scenarios? Are the 80% who weren’t persuaded by “conventional” techniques but were persuaded by advanced techniques zombies? No, but how in control of their decisions are they really? We’re all just sacks of thinking meat. I just want a fighting chance to make my own decisions, and I think that sufficiently powerful machine learning with access to sufficiently large datasets can strip me of my fighting chance.
I think how you feel about this depends on how likely you think the hypothetical is. I tend to think that we’re rapidly getting to the point where computers and data can persuade people in larger and larger numbers, past a tipping point of societal change. That’s not to mention the other examples that don’t involve persuasion – for example, the ability to qualify for a home loan.
The exact same algorithms that are used for targeted ads can be used to, say, find every person who might disagree with me politically. It’s trivial after that to falsify some criminal act and make those persons disappear. Or make their lives very, very hard from behind the scenes - and remember that in China, it’s not even behind the scenes. This data collection is the basis of a Social Credit score.
Is the US/Western government(s) currently doing that? Probably not. Should you just hand them the power to do so because they haven’t yet?
I hope the answer obvious to you is No.
The only reasonable means by which to evaluate how a society/government/law/etc should be allowed to function is to assume that you are the person on the bottom and the person with power over you is a sadistic sociopath who will exploit every opportunity to hurt you with the power they have. If the capability exists to abuse something, it will inevitably be abused eventually. You prevent that by stopping it now, when it’s “just targeted ads.”
Jesus Christ man if a government was going to do that they’d just get the info anyways, not giving up your data is not going to be what stops tyranny.
This is not a refutation of my point: I’m telling you that if you stop the data from being collected in the first place, then the government can’t “just get the info.” There would be no info to retrieve. That’s the purpose of legal privacy.
How would you stop THAT government from collecting whatever data it wants?
They don’t have the facilities. Those countries that have already surrendered those facilities (aka China) are probably a lost cause at this point. But the US government, for instance, has no mechanism by which to track people because it almost never directly interacts with them. People interact with private corporations, who sell that data en masse (or just have it hacked by the NSA) to the government for fun and profit.
If those corporations could never gather and store that data, then the US government could never pay for/steal that data from them.
This is a big reason that a state operated crytpocurrency (digital currency) is extremely, extremely dangerous.
I couldn’t find any news stories describing a Safeway license plate harvest either, so I suspect it’s somewhere between wildly exaggerated and never happened.
It’s disheartening though to hear how much of our personal information can be shared with private entities by DMVs.
If you file a tax return and claim a refund, the IRS either has your address or your bank account information, or you aren’t actually getting your refund. If you receive Social Security, pretty much the same thing.
No, if you are comparing tax returns and bank account information to digital currency, then you do not understand how extensive digital currency monitoring and worse absolute control is.
Sure, a bank account gives more information than I’m comfortable handing out willy-nilly, but it does not track all possible transactions with uniquely identified, programmable, non-fungible units. A tax return reveals almost nothing at all about individual transactions.
With a digital currency, every user in a transaction is uniquely identified. There is no cash or equivalent, and if the government decides they don’t like you, you or any of your currency units can be “turned off” or made a non-person with the push of a button. Your “money” just stops being valid currency and cannot be used in any transactions. They can impose any interest rate they chose including “deeply negative” interest rates as discussed by the IMF, and you can never withdraw your money or place it in any savings vehicle they do not approve of. So, in other words, they can force you to spend or else “and it’s gone!” happens in real time. Oh, and they can also control who you are allowed to transact with - that is, they can say “you are not allowed to spend money outside of your district” and therefore prevent you from accessing any good or service (like gas, food, bus fair, etc) from any location they like. They can also control how much of x, y, or z good your are allowed to purchase by simply programming the currency to be invalid after a, b, or c units of x, y, or z has been purchased. They can also control from whom you buy x, y, or z good - so I hope your social credit is high, or your loyal, loving customers will be literally incapable of transacting with you, while your corrupt-crony competitor becomes the only valid place to transact…
Digital currency would make the soviet union look like a libertarian utopia by comparison.
No. You lose a bout with ordinary logic. “All As are B” does NOT imply “All Bs are A.” Will you need the Latin name of this fallacy? 
On another matter,
Are YOU serious? There were news items decades ago FAR bigger than the one in question that seem impossible to find on-line. If you really are a super Googler, please start a thread “I can help you find old stories on-line.” If you really do have special search skills, you could help a lot!