Reflections In A Nosy Eye

 

Reflection Of A Homeland Security Logo 

I wrote about Twitter going public, and how it is part of a large-scale download of our souls into the data clouds of corporations, and will soon be accessible to all the Homeland Security agencies and NSA operatives, although they may have to pay Twitter for it with taxpayers money.

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/11/twitter-goes-public-bayesian.html

You may think my point was over the top.

Read the following from August about the closing of the website Groklaw :

...“I can’t do Groklaw without your input,” writes Jones in the blog entry. “It was really a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.”

[...]

Groklaw joins the ranks of Lavabit and Silent Circle – another encrypted e-mail service provider – as the three notable online resources whose shutdowns have garnered public attention. Lavabit owner and operator Ladar Levison did not give an exact reason for the site’s shutdown and stated in a letter announcing the site's closure that he was not allowed to by law. News that Edward Snowden was one of the e-mail provider’s clients, and Levison’s promise to appeal to the Fourth Circuit, fueled suspicion that the site closed while they fight a gag order from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court. Silent Circle followed suit to preempt any federal information requests, according to a company statement.

[...]

With Orwellian terms frequently tossed into conversation about the NSA, it seems only fitting that the “grok” in “Groklaw” comes from a Science Fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein.
 
“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group existence,” wrote Mr. Heinlein in the novel. However, there seems to be a difficulty finding a balance between the openness described by Heinlein’s grok and the government’s penchant for gathering up all of this information made public.

And we are left wondering what the heck is wrong with the people we have honored with all those positions of power in government and military?
What the heck?

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Twitter Goes Public! Bayesian Probability Goes Public!

Twitter had its Inital Public Offering, and the seventh pillar of the wisdom of the Internet was finally set in place.

I am going to ignore Twitter, just like I ignore Facebook.

Read the following:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520671/ads-could-soon-know-if-youre-an-introvert-on-twitter/
Ads Could Soon Know If You’re an Introvert (on Twitter)

Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs—conscious or otherwise—from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.
Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people’s core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages.

“We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” says Michelle Zhou, leader of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, which developed the software. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual—what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”

Zhou’s software develops a personality profile based on a person’s most recent few hundred or thousand Twitter updates. That profile scores the “big five” traits commonly used in psychological research: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It also scores the person on measures of “values” (for example, hedonism and conservatism) and “needs” (for example, curiosity and social harmony).

Zhou says she is working with several IBM customers to test how the technology might help their businesses. She declines to identify the companies but says they might use the system, for example, to tune marketing messages sent by e-mail or social media, or to select the promotional content displayed when a customer logs in to his or her account.

[...]

 Many businesses already make use of software that analyzes social-media activity. However, it is aimed either at helping corporate representatives interact with customers or at summarizing the overall volume and tone of a discussion (see “A Social-Media Decoder”), not at profiling individuals.

Will Twitter sell its profiling info to the CIA, like AT&T sells information? Will the NSA get to view it? You know darn well they will try in the near future, and - judging from what we've seen - they will succeed in getting into our heads even more.

The data collection will be constant. It will be the biggest experiment in Bayesian statistics in a society ever conducted! Bayesian analysis can be powerful stuff if properly done. There are too many passkeys and not enough deadbolts... and freewill cannot be free under constant scrutiny.

It's a fool's game of lethal proportions.
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Twitter

We were talking about Twitter while in Washington, D.C. last week.

I said how marvelous it was in allowing us to keep up with important events. (You will have to excuse me. I was eating, and my mouth was filled with some seeds of sarcasm at the time.)

I mean, the paeans sung to Twitter are well deserved. Just think how great a role it played, Arab-Spring-wise!

If it weren't for Twitter, Egypt would still be living under a military dictatorship!

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