Quote:
Original post by LessBread
Quote:
Original post by capn_midnight
Quote:
Original post by LessBread
I don't think it's smart to equate ownership of information with intellectual property. That's like mistaking data for code.
Lisp programmers see no difference between data and code.
I was pointing out a similarity not an equivalence.
What are copyright, patent, and trademark if they are not ownership of information? Works covered under IP *are* nothing more than information, arranged in a specific pattern, which is itself information, just as code *is* nothing more than information fed into a Turing Machine. (aside: Alan Turing probably only fell short of formally proving it because he felt it was a fundamentally obvious concept). Without ownership, you cannot have control.
Quote:
Original post by LessBread
Quote:
Original post by capn_midnight
Quote:
Original post by LessBread
Information about what you do in public isn't yours to horde. One visceral horror of "1984" was the invasion of private spaces. Everyone was surveiled in their homes to such an extent that even sex was criminalized. We've got a long way to go to get there.
When you use Google's services, you are essentially offering you data to them for free, snippits of information about your habits that they are expressly using to infer information about you. Visit a lot of sites that sell expensive items? They'll serve you ads for Rolex watches and Mercedes-Benz cars. The data is pointless, it's what they can infer about it that is important.
The problem is when inference goes wrong. Do academic researchers in aspects of child labor and child prostitution need to worry that their search records might be misconstrued to make them appear to have a personal interest in child pornography? People have gone to jail for less believable lies.
What I do in public didn't mean anything when there was no vast inference machine dutifully collecting and correlating my data. The point is not to control what people know about what I've done in public; people have always known what you do in public, that's the nature of doing things in public. The point is to control what they may do by inferring new information from that. Try buying fertilizer for your garden, diesel for your truck, and barrels to collect rain water on your property, on the same credit card, in the same day, and see how far you get without the FBI scrutinizing your every move.
Automatically serving me the wrong ads harms no one. Automatically flagging me as a potential terrorist has serious implications.
And if you are a terrorist, then not flagging you has serious implications.
does that include racial profiling?
Quote:
It seems to me that controlling inferences is more insidious than controlling data collection.
Prohibiting slander can amount to controlling inference. Or, to be more precise, it is the control of action that one may take given an inference one makes. An inference without action is meaningless.
An MIT student showed recently that one could reliably determine a person's sexual orientation based on evaluations of their Facebook friends list. Inferring that someone is gay based off of leaking data sets means nothing; depriving that person of a job because of it is an entirely different matter.
Inference is not real information. It's information that comes with the caveat of a confidence value. "We are XX% sure that
Miss Porcaro is hiding income."
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." - Cardinal Richelieu
