As a child growing up in Sri Lanka and India, I was used to how impossible it was to keep anything private. It almost felt like gossip was a full time job for many idle folks who stayed home and didn’t have much in the way of diversion. No television and radio programs of interest were fairly limited. As a result, these folks were theorizing about everyone else’s lives and fake news was all over the place. I have witnessed many cases where this had resulted in irreparable reputational damages to many.

After moving to this country, I began to appreciate the value of privacy. It is not that people didn’t gossip or wanted a window into others’ personal lives, it just was very different, both in terms of scale and the distance people liked to keep. Now, with the recent advances in technologies and lack of policies and laws, I feel that we have lost privacy forever. Anyone with a little time, minimal technical savvy and intent can learn so much about many of us at a scale that was unprecedented. As a result, it has become much easier for people to be judgmental and cause harm either intentionally or unintentionally. Worse, corporations and governments have gotten in on this to monetize and spy against the citizens.

Every day we hear one thing or the other. Today, it was Unroll.me selling to Uber information they had collected.

I take responsibility for signing up for Unroll.me without reading the fine line ““we may collect, use, transfer, sell and disclose nonpersonal information for any purpose” and that the data can be used “to build anonymous market research products and services.” I wish these services highlight these as much as they highlight how useful a tool theirs is. Of course they won’t!

I have grown fond of listening to the “Note to Self” podcasts by Manoush Zomorodi. Coincidentally, in a recent podcast titled “Revealing Selfies. Not Like That“, she talks about how the metadata embedded in digital photographs, combined with powerful tools like Google Image search, can provide so much information. In the podcast, Andreas Weigend, a former chief scientist at Amazon, walks the listeners through several examples of identifying precisely where and when certain anonymous photos were taken. Obviously, those in the photos were both surprised and shocked.

Frankly I have used this techniques to my advantage. I have catalogued numerous photographs taken during my visits to museums that allow you to photograph art and sculptures. I post process them by capturing the metadata (easy to write a script to retrieve them so that they can be added as a text field in the notes section) and then go through Google Image Search to capture the details of the art work or sculptures, copy and paste them. It is amazing how it works.

Of course, the scary part is that my vacation photos posted in twitter can be used by a thief to discern the date that the picture was taken somewhere in Europe. Based on that information, the thief may decide to break into my house or decide to stay there for a couple of days! (This is why I delay postings or don’t post them anymore!!!)

In another fascinating story about government surveillance titled “When Your Conspiracy Theory Is True“, Manoush describes how Daniel Rigmaiden (“not exactly the knight-in-shining-armor type – he’s a convicted felon who spent years building an almost-air-tight tax fraud scheme”) figured out the exact technologies that the government uses to track cell phones. One of them is called Stingray. One might ask why use this technology and not go to the cell providers to get the data. There are many reasons and I strongly encourage you to listen to the podcast to understand why.

First off, you need a warrant to get any data from the providers and it needs to be targetted. That is apparently too much work 🙂 Second of all, the crooks use clever methods to hide themselves so you need cleverer technologies to track them. When the government does this, information about several innocent folks are also captured in the process.

The situation we are in is that corporations and government are able to collect a ton of data about all of us with ease. When one is looking at just this information and use tools such as artificial intelligence, it is highly probable that they reach wrong conclusions about many of us.

It is in some sense no different than the idle folks back home who, through observations, hearsay, and gossip (“big data for their time”), painted pictures (using their own human intelligence) of individuals and families that were not always accurate and in many cases very damaging. The only difference is the nature and scale of  “big data”, enormous computing power and technological tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.