As more and more massive
data-collection operations begin to appear around the world, you see
a lot of people voicing concern about new issues created by this
technology. There are many concerns about how these huge bodies of
data will be used or misused. People feel like their ability to lead
a private life is being taken away. One very real threat this type of
data gathering creates is the ability to profile large of communities
or populations of people.
We've all heard the story about how
Target identified a teenager as pregnant before her father
had even found out. The story goes, Target tracks all purchases made
at their store and finds a correlation between certain products and a
woman's pregnant state. When someone purchased things like
scent-free lotion or certain vitamin supplements, Target inferred
that they were pregnant. They capitalized on this by placing
additional advertisements/coupons in the mail they were sending to
those customers.
A lot of people found the Target story
to be a bit creepy. The story broke in early 2012, long before any of
this NSA stuff had gone mainstream. Public knowledge about this type
of system, or meta-data in general, would have been lower than it is now. Basically, people
were uncomfortable with the fact that they were being spied on and
profiled to this extent without their knowledge. This was even
evident in the details of the Target story. During their experiments
to advertize to pregnant women, they would send out sheets of coupons
for purely pregnancy supplies. This made it very obvious that they
were tracking and analyzing their customers, and they drove many of
the recipients of these mails away. Ultimately, they achieved their
best results by hiding the relevant coupons between generic
advertisements.
I think all the customers involved already knew that stores tracked every
purchase made by every customer. Only when it became obvious that
they were being profiled and commoditized did people react and voice
their objection.
When the NSA leaks became public, a
very similar situation arose. Everyone basically already knew that
the government tracked them. What came as a surprise, however, was
how massive the data sets were becoming, and what specific pieces of
information were being collected. I believe that much of the tension
surrounding the leaks came from the fact that there were no examples
of how the data was being used. In Target's case, everyone knew they
tracked in-store purchases. If you asked people what they thought
Target used that data for, they probably would guess marketing, ad
placement, that sort of thing. Since you willingly interact with
Target, you can't really complain about that. With the NSA, I don't
think anyone knows how that data is going to be used. I think that
everyone is certain that a data set of that size and detail could be
abused. I don't think anyone is worried about the NSA selling 10%
more lotion and vitamins. They should be worried that they are being
profiled and manipulated by the government.
Consider the 2012 Obama campaign. They used similar data and profiling techniques and ran one of the most successful presidential campaigns of all time. That campaign raised and spent roughly 1 billion dollars. While the exact budgets of US intelligence programs are classified, its safe to say they are still orders of magnitude higher than 1 billion. If someone were to use the profiling power of the NSA to rig a political election, they would be unstoppable.
I think that in the long term, the public perception of the NSA will be shaped by how the data is used. Hopefully, as with the continuation of the Snowden leaks, more about this will come to light. It is possible that the NSA is actually gathering and using this data effectively to stop terrorist attacks. If that is the case, I think widespread acceptance of the program would be likely. However, in the event that the NSA is abusing its power, I don't think that could be forgiven.
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