Came across this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jun/14/google-instant-pages-web-searchNifty idea, but I'm increasingly concerned about the prediction power of advertisement firms, search engines, social media, online stores, etc...
Based on
trivial actions such as clicks or search queries, they can build very accurate profiles about you and even fill in the blanks very accurately. What do they do with this information? Beats me ... they don't tell anyone. Which information do they collect? They don't tell you that either ... it's all disguised into seemingly harmless and nifty services for a mostly gullible and unsuspecting population.
Let's take Facebook "Like" for example ... it's brilliant! People want their friends to know what they like. Why is this a feature in Facebook? Duh, tells Facebook what individuals like and what the population likes on average. Nobody thinks of that and it's so harmless that nobody realizes its just a wee bit of privacy's blood (until it bleeds to death).
The ability of these firms to collect and use information as they see fit, and build very accurate public and personal profiles without your consent is very troubling. These prediction tools with a wealth of training data are so potentially powerful that these companies probably know more about
you than yourself or anyone you know.
So, how can we make it harder for them? Well, aside of knowing the details of their methods ... one could probably employ comical methods to every day life:
- Deliberately do something you wouldn't normally do. For example, search for something you've never searched for. Click on something you wouldn't normally click on.
- Query non-sense. One can introduce incompatibilities into search queries:
- Assemble magic 8 balls using only rooster sounds
- Using gmail to grill giraffe meat
- Plant cacti in edible jello
- Ancient medicine cows and their effect on a future octopus race
- The smell of the color blue
- Spicy sauce for triangles
- Ambiguous search queries. One can phrase search queries with no clear interpretation.
- Attack bears with lasers
Are these attack bears equipped with lasers or are we wanting to attack bears with lasers? - Like, or similar, something you don't really like (i.e. mediocre). This introduces bias into predictions about what you and the population like.
- Append unrelated keywords into emails and messages
P.S. I talked to Cisco about U2 and Nike Shoes. I like KFC with Intel processors.
Not sure how much you would have to deviate from your normal behavior for it to be effective ... but if everyone did that, it'd probably be a lot harder to make predictions.
I think non-sense can be filtered out, if NLP can even solve comprehension problems yet ...