No social media trial

[Fist 666]

Something one would actually masturbate to. (of course there are people that masturbate to cars, cabins, food, etc. but I have to assume he's talking about material an inclined individual might find on pornhub)

[misteraven]

Something one would actually masturbate to. (of course there are people that masturbate to cars, cabins, food, etc. but I have to assume he's talking about material an inclined individual might find on pornhub)

 

LOL

[Dirty_habiT]

Sober December is good man, glad to hear. I've been on "supervision" for the past year. Today is actually my last day and this time I didn't try to pull a fast one on the PO by chiefing all the time and drinking even though it's part of my conditions not to. I honestly feel fine and don't think I'll go back. The money I've not spent on it alone is worth it to me, I've bought a lot more shit for my cars than I probably would have otherwise.

 

The no porn thing, that's a tough one I guess. If you go without porn and decide that you're going to try to meet someone I'd suggest giving yourself a little TJ before hand so you don't come off as too eager. Girls can smell desperate guys pretty well and getting a steady woman in your life can make the porn thing a non issue because you can just go rail on her whenever the need arises.

[Fist 666]

"the money not spent" adds up so fucking quickly IF you put it aside, if it just ends up being spent on some other dumb shit it doesn't do much good.

 

Trying to work heavily on this myself. I was really good about not buying frivolous crap for almost 3 months, but in the last week I've spent a couple hundred on old spray paint/ephemera without any real justification.

[T_R_O_N]

Aiming for a year of sobriety as I reflect on a decades worth of inebriation. The universe really out here trying to tempt your boy and it hasn't even been a month yet, lost my bike courier gig ( a blessing in disguise, that job encourages being an alcoholic..didnt even lose it because I was a drunkard, just got tired of waking up super early for work to only really start two hours after im already out and about...precious time I could be sleeping. Also, I had become a robot....how funny, the thing I once viewed as my saving grace and made me free amongst the suits had found a way to imprison me ) and have a lot of free time and got invited to a natty-bo sponsored event(free booze everyfuckingwhere )yesterday,which I turned down. I guess subconsciously and consciously im ready to really try sobriety out. A year ago I'd be down to be there and try to drink all the alcohol i could and maybe hoard a couple cans for obligatory alley drinking that would surely ensue. I'm still suprised I didn't go. High five to me i guess , will report back here around this time next year. (Hopefully ,we're still here ha..haaa..ha.........ehhh? Im still trying to figure out when we entered a scenario where life is playing out like one really long episode of South Park) EDIT: yo, I went on a super long tangent and forgot about the social media thing, deleted face book three months ago? Never needed it and it holds true now three months later, or I just never really had that many friends or associates to make having it necessary, hah *tear emoji*

[NightmareOnElmStreet]

Facebook is trash. Did not delete, but I completely stopped using it over a year ago. I’ve checked in twice since. Addicted to the gram. Extremely useful tool for youre average to advanced artist type. Can’t count the amount of opportunities or sales I’ve made with that platform. Frankly, if you’re an artist trying to get busy then you fuckin slippin without a gram acct. Less of course you’re a run of the mill writer or civilian whoever who could give a rats ass about posting a photo for some likes. (Hard shrug)

[Winnie Custodio]

For Sept I deleted Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

 

I kept reddit installed. Seems more like a forum than social media? It's anonymous for the most part. All the other apps I know people IRL who I interact with.

 

The only one I missed was Instagram and that was only because when I took a picture of some thing I wanted to have a venue to share it. I flooded my group texts with pics I would normally post on IG.

 

Reinstalled apps this Monday.

Didn't feel like anything was added to my life.

Five days into the month and I deleted them again.

 

Kept FB alive so the Gf can tag me in pics and family can see what's going on. Will probably install Instagram when I have a good photo dump waiting, post photo dump, and uninstall again.

 

I found I filled my breaks at work reading again. And my time at home in front of TV more. Will try to correct that and leave the house.

For Sept I deleted Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

 

I stopped being addicted to FB since I started having a life. I mean, I started focusing on work, decluttering and get rid of negative emotions. I still keep my FB though, just to keep me updated with what's going on.

[the.crooked]

I've got a good number of years experience in the bay area analytics scene if people would actually like to get a sense of how information is collected, analyzed, and commodified.

 

Feel free to throw questions at an insider.

[Hua Guofang]

Yeah, I've got a few questions, if I may?

 

1 - When apps and other similar services say that claim they anonymise your data before on-selling, how trustworthy is that and can that data be easily un-anonymised?

 

2 - Are there algorithms that can take data sets for known individuals /entities and pair them with anonymised data sets to reliably identify and de-anonymise data?

 

3 - Privacy statements of apps that are data collectors (such as household budget apps, spending account reconciliation apps, etc) have a strangely worded area regarding your personal data and what happens to it when the company is sold and your data goes with it. Can you talk about what happens to your data, whether it is anonymised before it is handed on when a company is sold and if not, do the privacy responsibilities that you've accepted when signing up to Company A then become those same responsibilities of Company B when it buys Company A or is the privacy section of the original contract with Company A voided by the sale of Company A?

 

4 - In the work that you do, do you utulise modern psychometrics to personalise that data and if so, what level of credibility do you give to those taxonomies?

[the.crooked]

Yeah, great questions.

 

1. It really depends on the company. The company I work for goes through great lengths to both be compliant with international law, and make sure that people are incapable of matching non-anonymized data with anonymized identifiers. Put one way, let's say you have a singular person ID of XXXXX which is considered identifiable with both your account, and your behaviors. That ID will be anonymized and the various behavioral data silo'd by department, use, and user. As a contractor, I have to pass through many layers of requests to even get anonymized data in most cases.

 

2. The only way this would work is if there was a non anonymized set of data that was standardized against the available data in the anonymized set, and then used to train a machine learning method that could find both enough differences in the non-anonymized set with enough reliability to predict a person's identity in a validation set, and then pushed against the anonymized data. This is really just a couple steps in an otherwise broad. Ultimately, this isn't incredibly likely. There are means that one could imagine. You could train a network to create profiles of diction for a given set of people, and then feed it quotes with no person attached to see how accurately it predicts the owner of the quote.

 

3. Case by case basis. Really depends on the contractual agreement in the terms of service, what the terms of the acquisition or merger are between companies A and B, and then what happens after that. Presumably a good faith agreement would exclude the idea of changing the ToS without notice. That said, new international laws are forcing companies to be able to reply for requests for data deletion upon consumer request, and to set up processes that can accomplish this within x period of time after the request. There's a lot of internal instability and unsuredness around those laws, however, mostly due to questions of implementation, and what level of aggregation can we keep data past. E.g. is it within the bounds of law that says you can't keep user behavior data after 60 days to aggregate it to daily values rather than individual user values, etc? Ultimately, these are questions and cases of law not having caught up with technology.

 

4. I think, ultimately, the notion of psychometrics is somewhat wishy washy. If you were to ask me whether the use of cognitive science is part of certain procedures? Sure. Why wouldn't it be? Are these all nefarious attempts at mind control through suggestive presentation? No.

 

Data's use can be split into a couple means of thinking:

 

I. Reporting

II. Optimization

III. Prediction

 

What you are questioning is both II and III.

 

To wit, most of what you are thinking about is what's referred to in marketing and sales as customer segmentation. In the technical sense, it's the application of unsupervised clustering algorithms along a number of dimensions to create behavioral profiles. Not of singular people, but rather of broader concepts of people writ large. Generally all these techniques have specific application but their base structures are agnostic to semantic content of the data but rather just difference in data itself. The end result is something interpreted in machine form, but based in the semantic value of a human interloper. Here's an example with Facebook: Based on my language, the complexity of sentence structure, the general topic of things I post about on facebook etc, not to mentioned self proffered data such as educational institutions I've graduated from, and countless other dimensions and conceived metrics, Facebook can make a highly probably guess that I'm:

 

- Well educated

- Politically liberal (their terminology, but lacks depth)

- Highly Social

- High value user

- Long time user

- Amenable to suggested posts

- etc.

 

These general reference points are useful in terms of "selling advertising" but whether those advertising dollars are well spent would rely on how much I give a shit to click on some served up ad next to me news feed. The better the model at understanding the broad strokes of my behavioral patterns the better ad serving will be in showing me something that is actually relevant to my life. Whether or not this is something that should be done at all is more a philosophical argument about the underpinnings of american democracy and where the boundary between it and economic philosophy begin and end. That said, facebook is a product, google is a product, etc. We engage in an active participation of a three party transaction where our eyes and behavior represent our respective payment for these products. Personally, I don't mind targeted advertising. I don't really believe in privacy so much as security, and I think American views on privacy are as much tied to puritanical notions in religion as they are oppression.

 

For those that are concerned about manipulation of experience and information, the same concept that has always governed interactions with institutions still applies: critical thought. In the question of whether or not there's some cabal of technocratic string pullers attempting to nudge people one way or another with the levers at their disposal, the answer is unequivocally no. Conspiratorial thought fails in perpetuity against the sheer size of people in the companies with enough reach and information to attempt to do so. That said, everyone's experience of the internet is literally different. Big companies such as mine, facebook, microsoft ,apple, etc. all invest in large scale experimentation platforms. All of this in better attempts to refine both user experience and internal metrics for growth. Is that nefarious? Really just depends on your perspective.

[Hua Guofang]

Thanks, great responses and really insightful.

 

The reason I asked Q2 was I have a close friend that works for a large company that leads in CRM and data management. They contract to a lot of global high-profile and high-prestige brands (automotive, as an example) and I've heard discussion of attempts to do exactly what I mentioned. Take data for a known individual (or organisation) and find ways of analyising large bases to reliably track down anonymised data to add to the information they already have. Obvious matches would be times and locations, purchases, etc. I am unsure if this is possible as yet (and my conversation alerting me to this thinking was not long before Xmas last year) but it would be a very powerful capability if possible.

 

My interest comes from a political and security perspective - I am also not in the USA nor am I American. I too have no problem with targeted marketing as at worst it is harmless and at best it can be helpful. However the techniques used in marketing consumer items are replicated with marketing politicians, political parties and even social ideologies. I work at a university and specifically in the security field. We cover a lot of cybersecurity (including ethics of surveillance, AI, etc.) and since Brexit and the most recent US election we focus a lot on foreign interference.

 

That gets to why I asked about psychometrics. Firstly, I have a minor in psych so I have a natural interest. Secondly, I understand the basic taxonomies and how they are attempted to be deployed. I don't know too much about it and am interested in how credible those types are and useful they are to shaping behaviour. Lastly, there are numerous organisations selling their services to governments, political candidates and civil society organisations who claim that they can do for them what marketeers can do for retail organisations. I'm sure you've heard of Cambridge Analytica and the likes and you're well aware of the claims that the Russian govt heavily utilised such methodologies to influence the recent US election. This is what I am interested in.

 

Finally, my interest isn't overly focused on what may be occurring now and how it works but what may become possible in the near future as machine learning increases in capability and the the ability to influence the behaviour of individuals/segments of society increases. An example of one of the great fears that gets bounced about is "what do we do when there is the capability to create vision and sound so perfect that in short time spans it is impossible to determine authenticity? What will happen when the image of the president comes on TV and says "We have just launched missiles at Iran/DPRK/Russia/China and will see justice done......etc" and the Chinese don't have the time to be able to determine the authenticity of this message".

 

That, of course, is probably the most extreme example right now, but it is a fear. I'm more concerned about how political agendas such as personality politics, racial politics, party politics, etc. can be shaped and influenced. Which is funny, as I come from a geopolitical/China background, so should naturally be more interested in the former. Go figure....

[the.crooked]

Ahh,

 

Those are very real problems, to say the least. When I was in grad school, I had machinations of writing a program that scraped publicly available facebook posts to create not just political profiles of regions and people, but rather rhetorical ones. What is the language to best sell a given political concept. Does person x believe in christiantiy, and if so, do they believe in the stewardship of god's earth model? If so, they are prime for pushing climate change policy, but can only be tipped in favor if framed in that form, "How would god feel about your disdain to the gift he's given you?" etc.

 

I was actually writing an article for some blog a friend runs on the notion of authenticity and the Turing test in light of these very technologies. Adobe VoCo is exactly one of the types of technologies you are concerned about. Introduced at a conference in 2016, it uses neural networks (what doesn't?) to develop a catalogue of phonemes and the other constructors of heard language. So, let's say I want to make a fake recording of Obama saying "Fuck Trump." With about 30-40 minutes of recorded speech being analyzed and broken down by the model, I can type "Fuck Trump" into the speech assignment panel, and it will spit out a seamless recording of Obama saying it. Couple that with the video manipulation techniques along the same lines, and yes, you have very real political concerns.

 

I think one of the broader points about authenticity is about voice. Even if someone put together a recording of me saying some wild shit I would never say, for it to be believable, it would need to be in my specific behavioral patterns for stringing words together. We are very good at even reading tone in written text and determining whether someone would or would not speak that way. Generative NLP models like this are something I'm super interested in.

 

That said, I think the concerns you are espousing are pretty inline for the direction we've been heading a long time. Piecemeal creation of the structures and models of our own cognition eventually giving way to the singularity. The problem of bad actors in a space leading up to that point though... well, I feel like a lot of us have felt fucked for a long time. When the general populace can't agree on even the value of objective fact vs subjective opinion, then how can I imagine some piece of shit Trump voter is really gonna be digging in to the subterfuge of geo-political strategy.

[One Man Banned]

Hrm. Consider this though... already in the past the CIA, and others, have made recordings of important figures with hookers, etc., and they've also staged photos of actors and look alikes in compromising positions to blackmail said important figures. With voice, we're not at the point you describe above, but already there are plenty of attempts to string together words of speech by a particular individual, extrapolations from different speeches, interviews, etc., mainly for comedic effect now, but you have to figure that the powers that be have already moved in the direction you describe. So, not a far stretch to say that in the near future someone somewhere will be able to include voice in the equation.

 

Behavioral patterns of words... I believe that part very much, but I don't think people are good at determining tone from written text- email and internet have proved that many times. And going back to voice for a moment, the public doesn't need tone or behavioral patterns, they only need to believe it was said or might have been said, and that's not too difficult to do.

[the.crooked]

I can only embed one video per post so here's 3 posts.

 

Video released by Adobe and Princeton on their work together on VoCo a generative model for recreating natural speech in any voice:

 

[the.crooked]

and an example of it in use from 2 years ago when they debuted it in beta:

 

[the.crooked]

And here's a video of real-time re-enactment of generated rgb video modelling:

 

 

We are very much there with both voice and video. It's a slippery slope for sure. I think these things are more about the building blocks of strong autonomous AI in the format we have always thought of from sci-fi. Sure, there are potential nefarious uses, but that's always been the case with any technological advancement. Shit, more oft then not, it's the de-weaponization of technologies that have led to advancements in the public sphere of things that were crated under the guise of military or security direction.

 

That said, Hua's initial questions regarding data security and use is a much different one than about the technologies above. It's the idea of combining all of this that leads to the very very grey area of questioning the social good of such technologies.

[Hua Guofang]

Agreed, we are definitely there, as you show. But as you’ve also said, that’s the extreme example, I’m more interested how messages are being used on key influencers (individuals and organizations) in society on pivotal issues such as race relations, arms control, birth control, ideology, legal rulings, elections, etc. this is already occurring and I expect it to expand in terms of outcomes (marketing, electioneering, investments such as the value of listed companies- think market manipulation for purchasing/selling of stock or maneuvering for hostile takeovers, etc) and occurrence.

 

Then there is also the purpose of espionage- social engineering, fomenting unrest in fragile societies, etc. these areas are where I have interest.

[Hua Guofang]

And to clarify, I’m specifically interested in the methods of collecting data. With the background of following comment being my complete lack of knowledge on this issue, I see three areas of collection: semi-overt areas like Facebook and Instagram and anonymized areas such as credit card use, smart phone GPS, phone apps, email, etc. Lastly there are the covert ways utilizing illegal activities such as hacking, malware, etc for data theft.

 

I see awareness about over-sharing already increasing rapidly as well as cyber hygiene. So I assume that the golden age of over-sharing is coming to an end or at least beginning a decline. Hence my interest in de-anonymising data and similar possibilities.

[EON 352]

I put a piece of Frog tape over the webcam on my laptop, but that's nowhere near enough probably. At this point I feel like that the NSA or a similar agency has infiltrated one or more of my devices of the years. It's just a matter of the odds, and having a criminal record probably adds to those odds as well. I admit that I'm addicted to social media. In the sense that I feel the need to fill any down or waiting time looking at every new piece of graffiti, new clip of skateboarding, or watching legendary glassblowers work live. It's becoming a gross habit, almost like smoking cigarettes in a way. I know I shouldn't let it take up so much of my down and waiting time. But it's as if parts of my brain have become responsive to the viewing and scrolling on the screen. In a way I feel ashamed for letting myself become something I said I never would. Letting myself become another sheep. If I would have spent half of the time I did fucking around with my phone as I did on my art. Hell, I probably wouldn't feel as rusty and out of practice as I do sometimes.

[Hua Guofang]

I At this point I feel like that the NSA or a similar agency has infiltrated one or more of my devices of the years.

 

And what, do you think, would make you interesting to the NSA, etc.?

[One Man Banned]

I see three areas of collection: semi-overt areas like Facebook and Instagram and anonymized areas such as credit card use, smart phone GPS, phone apps, email, etc. Lastly there are the covert ways utilizing illegal activities such as hacking, malware, etc for data theft.

 

Maybe related or not, but I have much doubts as to how anonymous credit card use is. They're one type of company required to send notifications on how your data gets used, and they share quite enough if you read their watered down notifications. Literally tracks your every purchase, checks your overall credit constantly, knows where you are (he just bought gas in TX, must be on a trip), etc. These days I use cash on every purchase I can.

[Hua Guofang]

All organisations that collect data sell it on. That includes Gmail/Google, smart phone apps and any other service/device that stores data on your actions and behaviour. Most privacy statements read alike, that they anonymise and sell on, will provide to law services (un-anonymised if required) and for academic research.

 

Goes without saying that most apps that assist with purchasing/account tracking and reconciliation are only ostensibly for what they claim they are. They are primarily data collectors, which commodify you.

[theprotester]

All we are is our data

[Hua Guofang]

Pffft..., least my data well hung though.

[the.crooked]

On the question of credit card data:

 

Almost all of that data is being used for fraud detection. You mentioned geo-position data, most of that is being run through a logistic regression to to classify whether a given transaction is valid or fraudulent.

 

Obviously there's secondary spending data that allows for spending profiles to be created, etc. but the main analytic function is fraud prevention. Risk and Fraud analysts/data scientists are some bad mother fuckers when it comes to statistics.

 

If you wanna ever understand some strong real world modeling, talk to an actuarial scientist for a large insurance firm. Those folk are no joke in the math world.