Danger 2: Mass data in the wrong hands
Posted: Sun May 25, 2025 7:06 am
Danger 1: preventive action
A known danger of misuse is preventive intervention; by analyzing online behavioral data, deviant and possibly suspicious behavior can be recognized in time. Often used in the hunt for terrorists. The suspect is attacked by a drone or customs officer, but also law-abiding citizens were wrongly arrested. What was the charge? Are you planning to commit a crime?
In the insurance world, too, the use of big data can lead to ethical discussions: should you exclude groups or latvia phone number list have a more expensive policy paid for based on statistics that big data thinks entail a risk? The discussion that is now taking place in America is all about this danger.
The National Security Agency is letting the quants (see last week, the qualitative analysts ) loose on the telephone registrations of Verizon. According to the Washington Post, the NSA and FBI would have access to big data from AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Youtube and Paltalk. All this under the code name PRISM.
Another danger is that mass data ends up in the wrong hands. In 1943, data from the Dutch civil registry ended up in the hands of the Germans, which made it very easy to track down the Jews. It was an example avant la lettre .
The danger of data theft is increasing. The paradox of behavioral data is that it defies the basic laws of economics: the price increases as the number of observations increases. The more complete the picture of human behavior, the more it is worth. It is like copper wire; when the price increases, the thieves come out of the holes. For N=everything you pay top dollar.
A known danger of misuse is preventive intervention; by analyzing online behavioral data, deviant and possibly suspicious behavior can be recognized in time. Often used in the hunt for terrorists. The suspect is attacked by a drone or customs officer, but also law-abiding citizens were wrongly arrested. What was the charge? Are you planning to commit a crime?
In the insurance world, too, the use of big data can lead to ethical discussions: should you exclude groups or latvia phone number list have a more expensive policy paid for based on statistics that big data thinks entail a risk? The discussion that is now taking place in America is all about this danger.
The National Security Agency is letting the quants (see last week, the qualitative analysts ) loose on the telephone registrations of Verizon. According to the Washington Post, the NSA and FBI would have access to big data from AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Youtube and Paltalk. All this under the code name PRISM.
Another danger is that mass data ends up in the wrong hands. In 1943, data from the Dutch civil registry ended up in the hands of the Germans, which made it very easy to track down the Jews. It was an example avant la lettre .
The danger of data theft is increasing. The paradox of behavioral data is that it defies the basic laws of economics: the price increases as the number of observations increases. The more complete the picture of human behavior, the more it is worth. It is like copper wire; when the price increases, the thieves come out of the holes. For N=everything you pay top dollar.