Big Brother is gathering data

[BJCooperIT]

Total Information Awareness - and so it begins...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1620&e=6&u=/sv/20040204/tc_sv/monsterlibrarianatwork

^{Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. ~George Bernard Shaw}
Consultant/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle 8.1.7 - Windows 2000

 

[jsteph]

I just think somebody at IBM is a big porn junkie!
--jsteph

 

[bluedragon2]

Don't worry, it is just pinky and the brain doing this, something always goes wrong in the attempt for world domination...



[Blue]Blue[/Blue] [Dragon]

If I wasn't Blue, I would just be a Dragon...

 

[chiph]

Oh, I thought this thread was about how 20,000 Tivo boxes gathered viewing habits during the superbowl. They apparently have the ability to tell how many times you paused and replayed the "wardrobe malfunction" at half-time.

Reason enough for me not to buy one!

Chip H.


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[dilettante]

Do those Tivo contraptions support an IR remote control?

Might be tempting to program a laptop with an IR port to do a lot of funky two-steps to add a little "noise" to their monitoring of your viewing habits.

 

[lionelhill]

oooh! Someone worked out I don't like getting mugged and care about safety. Wow. I'm really impressed. At this rate it could discover all sorts of things.

 

[BJCooperIT]

Yeah, but if I go in a chat room and say XXX's best friend is a pusher, XXX might not get a mortgage. Not very impressive.

^{Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. ~George Bernard Shaw}
Consultant/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle 8.1.7 - Windows 2000

 

[lionelhill]

.. more or less what I meant. There's a danger in schemes like this of spending a great deal of time discovering information which is either incorrect or blatantly obvious. The supermarkets are already experts at handling data like this from loyalty cards. But it's obvious to anyone that there are weaknesses. The Coop probably think we barely use them, but actually my wife keeps forgetting her loyalty card. Interpretation is the tricky bit, and requires a knowledge of humans.

 

[sleipnir214]

Plus there is the entire idea of corroboration.

I can say that a person X named X' is a drug pusher. But then the software first has to uniquely identify which person with the name X I was talking about.

Once the software has uniquely identified my person named X', it would have to find references in publications that corroborate my charge. It would then have to uniquely identify all the persons with Y, Z, A, B, C, D, E and F, all of whom are named X'.

Then it would have to connect my X to the particular person named X' from the public records.

If X' = "John Smith", this would have to be pretty hard and very non-deterministic. I suppose that if my name were Milton Srinivasan Winchester Liebermann, I'd have to word harder to keep my nose clean.

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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[BJCooperIT]

Exactly. In addition, who ever said there is a guarantee that what you read on the web or hear in chat rooms is the God's honest truth? Oh, please... what fool thought this was a source of accurate data?

Even newspaper announcements make mistakes. I sincerely doubt that they have achieved a level of sophistication that incorporates retractions or corrections.


^{Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance. ~George Bernard Shaw}
Consultant/Custom Forms & PL/SQL - Oracle 8.1.7 - Windows 2000