"Uncanny valley of sincerity" is the key thing here.
I regularly go to the same cafe for lunch. So some of the staff know me by name, but others who've just started working there don't. And I know their faces and one or two names. This is how it works on a normal human scale.
The corporate version of this delivers, as they say, asymmetrical friendliness. You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them.
And especially in the airline context, all this is devoted to more perfect price discrimination. They know your favourite drinks order so they can sell you more drinks.
> You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them
This made me think of what it must be like to be a celebrity. To have people fawn over you, whilst you can barely recall a fan's face for having seen so many.
I remember looking at John Cusack's Twitter feed around when he was setting up the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and it was a bit disturbing to see the number of strangers constantly propositioning him for sex, proposing marriage to him, asking him for money, or asking him to comment on their unusual ideas. I thought that that aspect of fame must not be that much fun for him or other people in his position.
I'm a musician in my area, and my dad comes in contact with a lot of people. It's not nearly on a "celebrity" scale, but about 2 or 3 times a week I get called out by name in public by a stranger. It's a really weird feeling. I'm pretty sure I would hate it if it happened constantly
Many years ago, I traveled to another city to see a Joe Satriani concert. I was really hyped to finally see him in concert, and hoped that I'd run into him and get a CD autographed.
So when I did run into him in the local community space, I had a thought: I could be another fawning fanboy, interrupting his shopping and day in general, or I could just think to myself "Hey, that's Satch!" and not bother him at all.
So I didn't bother him. I've long wondered if I made a good choice or not, now I think I made the right one.
One time in the 80s I took a date to a sushi place in Santa Monica. We ate, talked, had a nice time. When I went to pay, David Byrne was sitting right by the cash register. I'm sure he saw that I recognized him when we locked eyes very briefly, but I didn't bother him, just paid and left. (My date didn't recognize him -- so no second date.)
My theory is, why bother people just because they're famous? Unless they're looking for it, which is why I had a nice conversation with Moon Unit Zappa on Broadway in Seattle at the 76 station, where she was camped out promoting her movie The Spirit of '76.
I was in college in the LA area in the mid-1980s and worked for a valet company contracted by Los Angeles-area clients throwing birthday parties, gala events, awards ceremonies, etc. Though we were near Hollywood, we didn't often work for celebrities.
Except this once.
Meg Ryan was throwing a birthday party for her then-boyfriend, Dennis Quaid, and actors, musicians, and celebrities came to have their cars parked. Most of the valets were gushing and wowing over this or that celebrity or actor, but I tend not to care too much about star sightings and don't really go for celebrity worship.
A gray, older Citroen rolls up and it's my turn to park. Citroen are pretty low to the ground, only a little bit taller than Porsche roadsters, so even though I'm medium height I stood high above the car's roof with a good view into the driver's side.
The window rolled down and there he is, David Bryne, looking up at me and handing me his keys. His eyes seemed really big from that angle and I don't even remember him getting out of the car. I do remember that I had a feeling of awe and admiration (The Talking Heads had broken out on the Stop Making Sense tour and Byrne was known to be an engaged and consummate artist.)
Though our interaction was brief, Byrne's look suggested he understood I'd recognize him (I did!) and he looked at me directly and treated me as a fellow human providing him a service. No haste, no self-absorption, just a courteous exchange of pleasantries for service.
Or maybe I'm simply susceptible to being star struck by artists whose work I admire.
Not a good analogy. Being a celebrity brings features that are not available to non-celebrities (money, special treatment, etc.). Plus, celebrities often sell info. The Kardashians are a prominent example: The drink/food/whatever Kim Kardashian displays on TV might be very different from the drink/food/whatever she'd prefer on a flight. While facebook/google/apple might have access to that info, we only get to know whatever she decides to share (or sell).
> The drink/food/whatever Kim Kardashian displays on TV might be very different from the drink/food/whatever she'd prefer on a flight.
That doesn't strike me as so odd. There's lots of stuff I might read or watch in the comfort of my home that I might be embarrassed to read or watch on a plane where people will use their own preconceptions to judge me, accurately or not. For example, some Anime (and nothing all that weird, it's just the preconception that cartoons are for kids). I can't even get my wife not to judge me for that, so I might forego watching it on a plane just so I don't feel self conscious. I'm projecting an image of a responsible adult, Kim Kardashian is projecting and image of someone who likes X, Y or Z.
> For example, some Anime (and nothing all that weird, it's just the preconception that cartoons are for kids).
At this point it's not the age issue. I think most people get that there are animated shows for every demo at this point.
It's the fact that you had to preface with "nothing all that weird".
And the fact that I've heard that so often on the internet only to find out that "well, except for that, but she's not as young as she looks, she's actually a 5000 year old dragon. But they're all flirting with her because of her magic powers, not because she looks 8." Oookay...
> It's the fact that you had to preface with "nothing all that weird".
Yeah, but given the market it comes from and how prevalent it is there, that qualifier is really only used because some people don't realize saying "I watch anime" is sort of like saying "I watch a category that's a significant subset of Japanese mainstream television" when all people know is that the Japanese have some eclectic television by U.S. standards.
> And the fact that I've heard that so often on the internet only to find out that "well, except for that, but she's not as young as she looks, she's actually a 5000 year old dragon. But they're all flirting with her because of her magic powers, not because she looks 8." Oookay...
I hear you, and agree. That said, it's sort of like 5 years ago mentioning you use Reddit. Some subset of the public might only have heard about it through news reports/articles about some of the more problematic subreddits.
For what it's worth, my own tastes go more for the stylish and interesting stories that are harder to do when using live acting. There's some excellent (in style, story, or both) Science Fiction and fantasy that comes out as Anime (Steins;Gate, some of the Netflix series that have come out). Also, there's some really accessible ones I can watch with my son, such as Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood (which we just finished watching together, and is excellent).
> Yeah, but given the market it comes from and how prevalent it is there, that qualifier is really only used because some people don't realize saying "I watch anime" is sort of like saying "I watch a category that's a significant subset of Japanese mainstream television" when all people know is that the Japanese have some eclectic television by U.S. standards.
Such as mainstream Studio Ghibli anime "Pom Poko" which includes many songs and sight gags about testicles.[0] Or the Penis Festival.[1]
And this is another reason why privacy is a good thing. Even if you have "nothing to hide," how often do you want to be on display, with the change in behavior that implies?
"Uncanny valley of sincerity" is the key thing here.
I beg to differ with analogy (though not the rest of your post). The "uncanny valley" is a hypothetical situation where a construct is unpleasant because it seems human but not human enough [1]. The (supposed) solution to the uncanny valley effect is for a thing to seem more human.
But that's not the problem here. The problem is a corporation here really isn't your friend. The corporation aims to sell as much to you as possible at the highest mark-up possible. No amount of them improving the experience is going to change that.
The nice things about a local cafe have to incidentally nice. The cafe isn't a better designed experience some better designer has created to make more money, since then you'd be paying for every personalism of this service.
> You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them.
It's not the person in front of you who knows you, it's the corporation, and you are just speaking to an agent of a multi-embodied hydra.
Your primary goal should not be to know the agent, but to know the corporation you are dealing with, what its needs and wants are, how you personally fit into that picture, and whether the goals of the corporation and you are compatible.
However, sometimes knowing the agents of a corp well on a personal level can help in that process.
> However, sometimes knowing the agents of a corp well on a personal level can help in that process.
Exactly right. For example, there have been many stories here of people who are able to get a form of customer service from Google because they know someone who works there.
I don't mind someone being nice to me. I just want that if they're going to do it, do it when they want to. If some airline person isn't having a great day I don't need them to wish me happy birthday... let's just get through this transaction so they can get get on with their day.
IIRC there was a lawsuit where some retail employees were required to wink at customers as they came into other store. Someone at corporate decided this was a good idea. Something only folks disconnected from the actual store would come up with sitting in a conference room and certain that they would never have to wink at strangers all day long... or be winked at unexpectedly.
Empirically however, it's an artificial distinction.
You can see this in very high class concierge services, where they have deep dossiers on their clients, but a rotating staff of concierge's. Often there is a primary point of contact concierge that relay's the client's preferences to the others.
Taking that same approach, especially when it comes to measurable behaviors (types of foods/drinks, media consumption etc...), why would it be any different mechanically other than the fact that you prefer familiarity with the person you are talking with?
The only difference in whether data is creepy or not lies in the answer to a single question: Did you willingly provide it? In other words, did you choose to give it to them?
I tell the concierge service what type of table I like at a restaurant, to put into their file on me, so I expect anyone there to know that.
I do not tell a Bumble date where I work, so I do not expect them to know that (even though they could Linkedin stalk me).
A lowball offer on a house I am selling could be viewed as insulting. But, if before the offer I let it slip that an ugly gas station was about to go up next door, then all of a sudden the lowball offer is not insulting anymore.
> The only difference in whether data is creepy or not lies in the answer to a single question
Not at all.
> Did you willingly provide it AND REMEMBER?
People have inherent expectations and soft historical memories. The idea that consent is some boundary line is a dystopian legal mechanic, which is specifically at odds with the psychology of humans. Agreeing to something doesn't affect if it's "creepy" (a psychological defense mechanism).
I think you are using an unhelpful definition of "consent", albeit one that is indeed shared by some legal constructs?
The idea that "you consented to me having this info, so anything I can come up with to do with this info is fair game" is obviously bullshit. But that's just because it's quite obviously not really consent, but rather a case of someone trying to justify doing something that is obviously lacking consent. People generally consent to specific uses of information, so if someone is ignoring the explicit or implied purpose of collecting some information, they are really just pretending there is consent.
Which is, BTW, why the GDPR limits use of collected information to specific purposes (which have to be either inherently required for fulfilling some obligation, or there needs to be consent for that specific purpose).
Empirically, interesting usage of the word. What exactly are you arguing for? We can be objective but we have access to a rich and beautiful subjectivity. It's interesting in all these "measurable" behaviors there is no room for measuring an individual's suffering, which is quite real, but it seems those making the decisions are far removed from it.
A co-worker went to try a new restaurant, and ordered his drink. The bar tender made his drink as ordered, and then realized that there was only one person in town who ordered that drink and what he wanted was slightly different from what was ordered. Because she knew what he wanted she remade the drink to be exactly what the customer wanted not what the waitress wrote down. (she delivered the drink personally just to verify that it really was the customer she thought it was and not a new guy who might have wanted it as ordered, which is how I heard the story)
This is a good story that illustrates the problem very well. I don't want to be treated according to what my statistical cohort in a certain particular context suggests. But I have no problem with a personalized treatment from my bank personnel, from my cleaning staff, or from the undertaker. Or from the bartender who knows me.
That’s a lot of effort for a drink that is relatively unimportant in the scheme of things, but sure you could probably raise a couple million while real problems go unanswered. I think that is my problem with all the efforts on personalization, we should be working on more meaningful problems with open data analysis on high impact social projects. It doesn’t pay well which is the most exquisite torture of capitalism.
Of course what everyone else practises is relatively unimportant but your little pet social project is meaningful. Sure, buddy.
The fact that craftsmanship in this role can be rewarded is a fantastic thing. The people who can do things well can meet the people who want those things done well.
Personal nastiness breaks the site guidelines and will eventually get your account banned, so please edit it out of what you post here. If you'd (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it.
The comment would be just fine with just the second paragraph.
I seek to minimize suffering. This can be in transportation, housing, healthcare, education, nutrition, or legal fields. These have a disproportionate impact on our lives and are neglected with low salaries. How does this make sense? I'm disappointed you view this as a pet project. I disagree that craft for the sake of craft is fantastic but I would not personally attack you for it, if you have the safety net you are welcome to pursue what interests you find rewarding. Many do not have the economy of doing so, they are who I work for.
I'm arguing that lamenting "mechanization" of social interaction - whether between corporate employee and client as in this example, or even between individuals - is akin to appealing to ether as a virtue of the universe.
If interactions between actors can be measured (which they can to some level of specificity in certain contexts), and the desires of the actors can be understood to such a degree (which we're starting to be able to do), then we can model actions which increase or reduce the likelihood of desired outcome, and following from that can produce and optimize decision support systems that nudge users toward some mutually beneficial state that may have otherwise been opaque to both actors.
People seem to hate this idea because it basically puts hard determinism right in their face - in that your past behaviors if known well enough should be predictive of future actions ceterus paribus.
It's often argued that, such a granularity of measurement in social dimensions is impossible technically, or the fact of being measured changes their behavior. I wouldn't argue either of those to be untrue, only that it need not be perfect to increase the overall optimization of the system.
So instead of saying, yes lets use measurement to optimize our system of interactions across commerce and relations, people bristle at the mere concept of social engineering in the Popperian sense of the term because it feels restrictive to our sense of "free will." I argue the opposite, that doing such would simply make us more aware of our predilections and much more likely to be able to align them across groups.
>> nudge users toward some mutually beneficial state
How do you agree on that ? Because that's currently missing in most selling processes that use manipulation - that's exactly why manipulation is used in the first place.
There was a book called Nudge that takes up this topic to some extent, basically hacking people's decisions in "beneficial" ways, like making healthy foods more prominent in grocery stores, or changing organ donation from opt in to opt out. (Not sure those examples are entirely representative of the book, but they're the main ones I remember.) I was ambivalent. It was interesting what could be done to subconsciously influence people, but I bristle at the idea of being manipulated without my awareness, even if it's already prevalent, because usually it's done to benefit other-than-me.
My approach to education requires the students understand the subject and build their own representations. Nudging in the large is not acceptable to me, but it the small perhaps to gain the tools for understanding. Tricking someone into understanding a thing for themselves seems ok.
Yes I mean empirically. There is no theoretical difference between what an individual human perceives about another person and what can possibly be tangibly measured about that person by some combination of systems.
Right, sometimes it's just the standard of service. I wrote an app for a local restaurant/bar in exchange for lifetime free food/drinks and I still get great service. This is also in a place where tips aren't a thing.
You can still mess with them, however. On airplanes, claiming misidentification would be unwise. Also in retail, if you're epaying. But if it's just cash, and they've identified you through your phone or whatever, it's fair game to play.
Now society in towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. These we call sentimentalists,—talkers who mistake the description for the thing, saying for having. They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature; poetry,—O, they adore poetry,—and roses, and the moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor; they love liberty, “dear liberty!” they worship virtue, “dear virtue!” Yes, they adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel; we shiver with cold. A little experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mimicking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment? Was ever one converted? The innocence and ignorance of the patient is the first difficulty; he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough realist or a phalanx of realists would be prescribed; but that is like proposing to mend your bad road with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, imprisonment, might be tried. Another cure would be to fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist with a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to suspect that something was wrong.
This still feel relevant today in explaining the push back against modern liberalism and social justice movements. Emerson was apparently not a fan of virtue signaling.
I've noticed over the last few years an arms race in welcome-emails trying to sound personal. Like when you receive this email 10ms after you submit the register form.
> Hey Dan, was just tailing the access logs and happened to see you register. ;) Let me know personally if you have any questions! – Chuck, CEO
It's even sadder when the templating system is broken and you see "Hey {{firstName}}".
Congratulations for becoming record #b6aeca9c-b249-4238-87ab-54c8adbf9762 in our customer database.
Please be advised that becoming a customer does not make you profitable for us. To earn your place on our hard disk you have to spend at least £23.84 more with us this year or get at least three of your friends to sign up as well.
Do not reply to this automated message as this email address is permanently unattended. We are a strictly no-support, no-human-touch enterprise as this is the only way to make this service sustainable. You don't want to ruin it for everyone else, do you?!?
You have subscribed to our Unlimited Forever Plan. However, please be warned that we have a secret fair use policy in place to deter any free riders taking advantage of our generosity. Penalties and account closures may or may not apply according to our terms of use.
Now I feel misunderstood. I thought it was a perfectly good straw man argument, not just a measly false dichotomy.
always_good's complaint was about an embarrassingly fake personal tone coming from a complete stranger representing a corporation. S/he didn't complain about a lack of brutal honesty regarding an obviously deceptive business model.
In any event, it's a joke. I agree with both of you. You don't have to be glaringly dishonest either in tone or in the way in which you structure your business model.
That comment just triggered work mode too hard, and at the moment, any point but a hard, way too specific, and nasty to refute point is void at work. It's been a rough week.
Or if you want to be a bit more original/quirky, you can do: "Hi! This is the server[0] at XXY! (...)".
I remember getting emails like this from automated web-mailer services in the late 90s/early 00s. If in those days you would have made your server sent out personalised messages masquerading as an actual live human being, people would be quite upset and felt betrayed. That was not done. In fact, people mistook now-obviously form-generated letters for being human-written a lot more often (because the tech was new). Adding onto that confusion by being deliberately surreptitious was something done only by spammers and other vermin, maybe the occasional pranking of friends, but that was it.
In my eyes it never quite became globally acceptable, either. Some consumer cultures are more okay with it than others. I just learned what other features I need to check to suspect a computer instead of a human. If they turn out to have been trying to mislead me, I'll adjust my opinion of them accordingly.
It's perfectly possible to have an automated message not be all stiff and robotic, even putting a smile on the recipients' face, without actively trying to impersonate a human.
[0] with the assumption these notifications are sent to a tech audience that understands what a server is, adapt as needed
I’d actually appreciate such a message because it’s ridden with humour and humility - “Yes sir we do automate our onboarding and you will receive the same exact treatment as any customer” is reassuring. Especially in these times where platforms tend to evict people on political basis, I get reassured when I’m just a number.
Yes please, that way I can start looking for a better provider, pay the money, or just ignore it. At the very least I’ll give you points for honesty, and might take that into account when making the decision about paying a bit more for a service that doesn’t treat me like a lab rat.
> "Hey Dan, I was just violating our privacy promises by personally inspecting user data that should be on a need-to-know basis, and happened to see you register! Please let your local regulatory commission know if you have any complaints!"
This sort of thing always reminds me of Idiocracy: "Welcome to Costco i love you".
Occasionally you run into a genuinely nice staff member at the supermarket who immediately learns your name, asks about your kids, etc. Companies notice how everyone is pleased with that, and then get the idea that they'll somehow force the behavior onto the rest of the staff.
Everyone is forced to greet you, thank you by (poorly pronounced) name off credit card, and they send secret shoppers to penalize them if they fail to do these things. The end result of which ends up being negative, because no one particularly likes hearing friendly words that clearly aren't genuine.
Knowing your favorite drink is obviously not on par with knowing that you're on thin ice with your HR department, and it is the corporation, not the flight crew, who has been (possibly) invasive. To me, it feels like a bit of a transgression whenever a business goes out of their way to find info about me without just asking.
If you want to know something about me, just ask. I might refuse to answer, or ask why you want to know, but at least you haven't started off by disrespecting me. I'm not sure how so many businesses have become confused about this. Maybe they've calculated that pissing off a substantial number of their customers is a worthwhile trade-off, but it seems like a bad direction to go in even if the short-term numbers look positive. </rambly paranoia>
All the rewards and loyalty programs are keeping track of all your activity and is being made accessible to the staff that interacts with you. From a business perspective, an unknown person offers more risk than an known person so it makes financial sense to know who you're dealing with. In high margin, low volume businesses this was already in place, just with sales people keeping track. It just wasn't easily possible to do that for whole populations until recently such as retail, hotels, airlines, etc.
I imagine soon many will start cataloging how many times a customer causes damage or makes a scene or is rude to staff, and if it gets logged with enough frequency, they get banned system wide. It'll be interesting to see how long "the customer is always right" stays in place once we have no choice but to deal with home Depot or Lowe's, or Walmart vs target vs Amazon, or one of the 4 or 5 airlines and hotel companies.
Lenders and landlords have been doing it since forever, no reason for the other businesses to not get on board. All the troublemakers will be sifted through and left to deal with organizations outside of the mainstream.
I agree with the customer's perspective of this. But there are businesses where personalization is key. For example, YouTube absolutely needs to know you in order to keep you watching addictive content. Without this, they would probably still not be profitable.
Ever notice how bullies will always memorize these small personal details about a target and then when manipulating or gaslighting make sure to mention those facts?
E.g. Oh a new crisis "just came up". I need you to complete this big menial data entry task that I forgot about for a week right now (drop whatever you were working on before). Don't you want to make it to your daughter's concert tonight? Best get it done by EOD so you can be there for her. Next day: how's progress on that thing you were working on before?
It’s all about control, and intimacy as a route to control. A bully uses it to instill dread, a company uses it to influence behavior to make money, but the root is the same.
The inverse of all this surveillance is using CRM for everyday things. I can often tell when someone (recruiter, SaaS sales, dentist, etc) calls me because they have an alert in their CRM that the contact is cooling. Is it insincere? No, that's the depth of our relationship. So long as they aren't pretending to be zealously enthusiastic in that weirdly corporate, millennial zombie cheerleader way, I will deal with them.
To me, for airline and other staff to address me by my first name is like being addressed as "Comrade," where only a counter-revolutionary could object to being addressed as a comrade, and would clearly require that I be marked as what I can only assume to be a problematic opportunity, and scheduled for enhanced scrutiny.
The horses of dystopia have already left the barn, it's just a matter of how you choose to live out your remainder of it.
Personalization is very overrated. I remember reading a big NY Times piece on how their tech team uses an embedding-based personalization and recommender system, with a sexy blog post about their internal team that implements it, and I just recoiled in horror.
For one, searching for content on NY Times site sucks. I just want a better search engine without personalization. Just better categories, tags, search by relevance to a named entity or narrowed in a time frame, which just works. Currently it’s an awful way to look for things. Couldn’t they spend engineering budget better on just search engine problems, rather than some sexy, over-hyped customer embedding model with all kinds of gadgets to solve cold start, etc., but which doesn’t seem to actually add value?
The other thing is that you _know_ the whole purpose is to optimize some notion of engagement that is not actually a healthy measure of the user getting value out of the product.
I think there could be some minimal benefit to stylizing or customizing results based on highly aggregated characteristics, like country or a super broad age group.
But beyond ensuring the user is routed into a very high-level bucket of characteristics that can broadly determine relevance, anything more specific to individuals or anything relying on nearest neighbor or collaborative filtering based on a highly individualized representation, is just flat out unhealthy, by design.
Information retrieval without personalization is like the new version of “I just want my phone to actually function as a phone.”
We are on a path to some entities knowing almost everything about most citizens but these citizens know almost nothing about these entities. I think a good way would be to open up all data but whoever benefits from the current asymmetry will fight that tooth and nails. There won't be much profit in data everybody can get.
Honestly, I think that's how life always is (this is the inner artist in me speaking).
You can have all this data on the outside, and it still speaks nothing of the person on the inside.
Companies can have every detail of your life parameterized and quantified, but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norms. Intentionally feed data that looks patterned, and then switch it up in a way that makes people scratch their heads and go 'huh'.
You can walk around with your phone in your pocket and have that awareness, e.g. "I am purposefully taking this route on my walk to work while listening to this music on repeat for 30 days" because you know people are going to draw some correlation.
You do 'know' things about those entities, namely, their brains are hooked on a drug called machine learning. That doesn't void you of your privacy.
>but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norms. Intentionally feed data
And future algorithms will detect it. Not enough of the population will do it. At best you'll be classified as a deviant and you might have difficulty getting apartments or loans. At worst, well, maybe the first with their back against the wall when the corporate takeover comes.
I'm OP, not your parent commenter, but I do understand the perspective.
This is something that is actually occurring, there really is a psychological war going between how much information black box entities have about entities they provide a 'service' for, in how it impacts the experience of living life, the fact that most people have no choice but be connected to the internet (the subject of the linked article).
It's a psychological war in that it's an inverted microcosm of the history of discrimination. Instead of just judging people based on some generalized set of superficial details like appearance or a quantitative metric of intelligence, a GPA, resume, etc - a lot of organizations are refining it down to the most seemingly insignificant and 'supposed' trivial details.
Which is missing the forest for the trees, even though it may be profitable in the short term. The US has a president that fancies himself a dictator and looks up to / highly respects people like Kim Jong-un and Uncle Xi. It's the cultural and political climate so it's clear there are real reality reasons to show cause for concern. All this stuff influences what people think is acceptable and where to draw the line. It's all background noise information that propagates into models of interpersonal boundaries - what people are willing to tolerate and what they will cry out against. Learned social behavior, etc.
It supports fear culture and that is another tool people can use to manipulate and control others. Regardless of whether it actually works, this stuff is the mentality of some people in power. So when I read comments like the parent that replied to my original comment (I'm OP), the point is - guide them out of the conspiracy but understand where it's coming from by describing why it is true while not necessarily being true.
Fear culture controls. People who want to control others for any purpose aside from improving the well-being and respecting the autonomy of others are aware of this. There are plenty of existing technologies (look back to the development of advertisements) that exist purely to manipulate emotional state in order to direct behavior, and I have no doubt there are some folks out there looking to refine it down to a precision science.
The real front lines come down to, how far will they push it before people 'snap' (and you can see that happening with the US president, because honestly, every intent a 'self' attempts to have on others comes back to affect the individual 'self'). I think that explains his ludicrous behavior in a way that has empathy, because you can tell, all that garbage he has done to others continuously affects his perception on how he sees those around him. The man can't trust anyone except for dictators lately.
I don't think there's going to be any kind of corporate takeover aside from corporate rebellion, possibly. Creating a tight association between the government, the media, and corporate interests is too last century. There are some interests that seem to be going in that direction, but it's clearly not all of them.
You said, “People who want to control others for any purpose aside from improving the well-being and respecting the autonomy of others are aware of this.“
But this is precisely the most nefarious type of control. Nothing is more insidious than the conviction that you are controlling others for their own benefit.
When I say that, I mean 'well-being and autonomy' implies listening to people, giving them space and time to find their own self, offering guidance if they request it, affirming they have choice, offering help if they are confused, and sometimes even being confused with them. It's no different from being a parent, a teacher, or a therapist.
It doesn't have to be seen as nefarious if it isn't.
I'm not going to sacrifice my sanity and overall wellbeing for the purposes of the state. I don't live in China, I am not going to act like I have to protect myself like I live in China.
Future algorithms won't detect it. The future population will do it without realizing that's what they are doing. That's what generational rebellion is all about.
P.S. I'm already a deviant, and I'm fairly well accepted in my community that values diversity over discrimination, offers me everything I need to sustain myself independently, plan for retirement, etc. I managed to get all that, while being a deviant.
It's counterproductive to worry about. I do my work, get the job done, I do a good job, end of story. Why overload the brain with fears when I have to use so much of it to reason correctly and create good code? Does that make me more predictable, more easily controllable, more financially viable, or less? Those are questions people who want to control other people can ask themselves.
" but people can always choose (i.e. get woke) to intentionally conform or to defy norm"
You can play some little games but you won't be able to choose to not get rejected by different services based on that data. Just look at what happens to people on no-fly lists or who deal with identity theft. Easy to get onto and hard to get off. The more data these entities have and the more they can hide behind algorithms the more they can make your life miserable and you will have no idea where your problems are coming from.
> The more data these entities have and the more they can hide behind algorithms the more they can make your life miserable and you will have no idea where your problems are coming from.
I'm sure I sound overconfident but honestly, been there, done that. Having been suicidal for approximately half my life has transitioned into meaning, have no attachment to anything. Appreciate what exists while it's there, but don't be attached to it, don't depend on it for survival. Goods, services, liberties, freedom of expression, places, people.
Life has been miserable enough for me while potentially having everything I could potentially get rejected from. If someone wants to make my life miserable, I pity them.
Edit: I would not categorize identity theft under the same label as being put on a no-fly list. Identity theft can indirectly lead to being put on a no-fly list. Being put on a no-fly list should not lead to identity theft (assuming the entities that hold this information are as secure as they present themselves to be, given their stated purpose for their existence).
From a data analysis perspective, that's a correlation to construct that could actually help people deal with the issues of too much data correlation being used to form expectations of behavior (like getting on and off lists that prevent essential liberties and rights from being exercised fairly).
We don't even have data about our own behaviour. Someone should build a self-hosted personal Google Analytics equivalent. RescueTime comes the closest, I think. There was https://connectordb.io/ but the project seems dormant now.
>> We are on a path to some entities knowing almost everything about most citizens but these citizens know almost nothing about these entities.
I think Google is already there, at least for chrome users.
>> I think a good way would be to open up all data
Psychologically, this is a bad option. People need privacy, especially interpersonal privacy, which today, is generally, somewhat preserved.
Of course, you could come with the claim that once everything is open, people will adjust, and things will be fine. But that's a huge and very risky experiment, and relatively hard to back-off from, once the data is released.
And technically/legally it is possible to create more corporate privacy on the internet. It's just that there's no real political pressure to do so.
If the data is free the only actors that capitalize on it will be the people that automate the ETL on it and are constantly looking for new ways to apply it.
The average consumer has very poor access to proper ETL.
If you are in Istanbul and you want to use public transportaion with monthly subsrciption you need to buy Istanbul Pass with your ID, it has your name, picture etc. Because you provided your ID they know your birthday. Thus, on your birthdays when you step inside your bus and make your Istanbul Card read by the device (NFC) it says laudly "happy birdthday!". Because all kinds of public trasport use same card, like in ferries, metros, toilets, busses, trams you hear "happy birdthday!" all day in multiple locations.
https://youtu.be/1mJJPID104s
Oh, and you can see from their web sites where you have used your Istanbul Pass in the last few months, like "bus M42 Mecidiyeköy-Bakırköy, at 12:34 Today, -1 credit".
That sounds kinda nice to me, actually. If I see someone going through a turnstile and their birthday is announced, I can shoot them a smile and a nice “hey, happy birthday”.
Little things to invite positive personal interactions between strangers can be a good thing. That is, perhaps, not the intended purpose, but it at least seems like a welcome side effect.
A very unwelcome side effect of that would be that I don't get to control it. It's obviously unnecessary for the service to be performed, but they decide to "invite positive personal interactions" no matter whether I want any of that at that moment in that place.
far worse asymmetry: The Government can spy on citizens, but citizens can't spy on their government.
This is precisely backwards of a free society.
The Snowden episode both comically and tragically exemplifies this: He is an outlaw for giving the citizens visibility into the government's surveillance of those citizens.
National security justifies government secrecy? I believe the opposite. Government secrecy jeopardizes the security of a free nation, turning it into an unfree one. It protects and enables corruption and hypocrisy. And it is used FAR more often in government acts the violate the principles of freedom, fairness and justice.
The common argument against privacy, that "If you have nothing to hide you have no need for privacy", while fallacious when applied to citizens is spot on when applied to government (the entity with all the power).
The government should have nearly nothing to hide if it is doing nothing wrong. Most of the justified cases are far outweighed by the dangers of the unjustified ones. It's not worth the trade. The only secrets that should be allowed are those that protect regular citizens, not the government or any of its agents.
He’s an outlaw for having stolen highly sensitive classified info much of which was unrelated to domestic surveillance. He doused gasoline and lit a match over a good portion of our secret military ops.
Just because the government deems something "highly sensitive classified info" doesn't mean it should be, especially not with the US's history. Not that there are better countries, but considering what the US has done in the recent past, it shouldn't be trusted.
I have never looked over the details of what Snowden made public. Can you give examples of info he released that does not pertain to mass surveillance?
Personal wellbeing hint: Do not ever joke about an airline pilot's recent alcohol intake, as the article suggests. This has been done, was treated as a genuine accusation, and precipitated cancellation of the flight.
Don't fully recall consequences to the joker, but they weren't good, starting with being identified by seat number to fellow passengers.
Unfortunately, the day and age of social media requires any accusations, joking or not, to be treated as real. How horrible would it be for an airline to allow the pilots to fly when someone suggested they may have been unfit to fly and the accusation was recorded with employees of the airline shown to be aware of the accusations. The lawsuits would be ridiculous.
Don’t joke around about things in the airport or on an airplane. Safety and security are generally number one in the minds of the front line employees. Turns out we like going home alive too.
But given the capability to know such information, you'd also know the names and email addresses of all passengers. So just send a report on the pilot to them all. From a thoroughly anonymized and proxied account. Including yourself as a recipient.
Facebook has somehow figured out that one of my profiles is directly tied to some of my credit card activity.
I wasn't being entirely careful about locking things down. And now I get some extremely specific ads, relating to a 30 day rolling window of recent purchases.
I'm trying to think of the best ways to poison and destroy this linkage, that was established some time after September. It may indeed be true that I just have to totally disconnect.
On some level, this is regrettable, only because Facebook absolutely monopolizes access to the updates some people choose to publicize for themselves, since those people know no other way to broadcast important information.
Mostly, these people are not geeks with technical fetishes. They don't have the slightest inkling about packets, ports, sockets, protocols. They don't understand that an iPhone does have a root file system. So facebook is it, and no distributed immitation cheese or diet margarine will replace their coca-cola brand social media.
I didn’t see any dystopian or even mildly strange parts to it. Can you give more detail on which parts had some absurdity? All of the examples of how a customer could have creepily personal information about airline staff seemed like entirely realistic analogues of the type of personalization efforts companies make towards customers.
A bit different, but something similar does happen already,
when people rate taxi drivers, cashiers in a store, or people commenting on airbnb hosts. These reactions often get personal rather than being based on an objective evaluation of a transaction.
Point is, the "flight crew"s and even the "pilots" are not the corporation. The corporation may easily sacrifice their privacy if its believed to contribute the bottom line. Even the CEO might be sacrificed. The really private things about a corporation are its finances, its tradeoffs of customer benefit vs "efficiency", its market segmentation policies, etc.
Here's a thought experiment. What if corporations hired a bunch of people whose job it was to be genuinely happy that it was your birthday. Maybe they divide their user group into days such that each day one of these employees would only be responsible for feeling happy about one or two users' birthdays. This employee would send you the email. And they would be happy about it and truly glad that it is your birthday.
more. It's manipulative because they want something out of you. They want you to _feel_ closer to them than you truly are, so that you _feel_ something such that you bring them more business.
Having your emotions manipulated such that you feel closer to your flight attendant means you may spend money on their airline like you're friends. But the truth will come out when the plane lands and you say "Hey, wanna go see a movie?" and they're horrified. The problem is that it's pretend w/ a cause. If it was just pretend and both were on board, it would be like children. If it was genuine, then all the better-- few things are better than genuine friendship.
More. The more companies make a fuss about birthdays, the more it takes the fun out of it. I no longer wish people a happy birthday on facebook because of the way facebook shoves it in my face all the time. There are like three people I say happy birthday to - facebook may remind me of them, but I call them on the telephone to say it. I use Jan 1, 1970 as my birthday any time a site asks me for it.
If you don't know me, what does it mean? Maybe I'm terminally ill and every birthday is just a reminder of time running out. Or maybe I'm terminally ill and I don't care? How could someone know this without knowing me personally.
I guess that's a german culture thing. Don't try to be a friend unless you're willing to undersetand a person and support them even through bad times.
Depends. You're basically describing a morale officer, like Neelix from Star Trek, or an empath from Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri. Or one of Jack Ma's 'High EQ' people.
I would much prefer working at a place where people liked me, even if they had been hired because they were more likely to like everyone. But not if they become the sin eaters of the group because they produce no useful work, or they have no autonomy in what they do to raise morale.
This reminds me of the question - if you feel guilty for doing a terrible thing, is it somehow more forgivable? If it isn't, why are we so horrified when someone does a terrible thing and doesn't feel guilty later?
Just to take away the creepiness factor, I'd say things like: Passengers who shared their favorite drinks with us rate us higher because we know them better and serve them accordingly.
This is akin to amazon's main website changing "We recommend the following to you" to:
"People who bought this also bought" - to induce a subtle hint of jealousy that others are getting a better deal and this is totally optional.
Any recommendation system should be a voluntary opt-in feature and should consistently do a great job at recommending.
Finally are article that points out the real effects of corporate surveillance instead of making vague references to Black Mirrors: it's psychological warfare.
> As the cabin crew serves you a drink "Dave! Can I get more peanuts? I know you're on your final warning from HR - and I'd hate for someone to put in another complaint."
"Total surveillance is the perfection of democracy."
> The true horror of technological omniscience is that it shall force us for once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we shall have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. The new equilibrium will not involve tilting at the windmills of ubiquitous sensors and processing power but rather learning what explicit rules we can actually live by, finding, in effect, the real shape of human society.
Parity of information is the difference between Star Trek and North Korea.
Yep, like information on Omega where they not only restricted information from basically everyone but would resort to straight up thievery to ensure it could never be developed.
I regularly go to the same cafe for lunch. So some of the staff know me by name, but others who've just started working there don't. And I know their faces and one or two names. This is how it works on a normal human scale.
The corporate version of this delivers, as they say, asymmetrical friendliness. You see someone you've never met before and they know your name, birthday, etc. while you know nothing about them.
And especially in the airline context, all this is devoted to more perfect price discrimination. They know your favourite drinks order so they can sell you more drinks.