Permanent Record—online tracking, behavior modification, and the death of privacy—Ashes Ashes #3
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 2018-12-24

Every minute of your day you're tracked by a host of companies using a plethora of tools and techniques. In this episode, we dig into how this technology has infiltrated the real world, follows you into the digital domain, and shapes the world around you. Join us as we delve into the shadowy reality of corporate surveillance. 

Podcast by Ashes Ashes, reposted under CC License. Browse episode resources & read full transcript at https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-03-permanent-record

Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more at https://stopfossilfuels.org

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT

David: We've had some kind of tracking for as long as advertising and the idea of consumers has existed because for businesses to most efficiently target and sell us things that we may or may not need, they've tried to break us down into demographics, historically very broad. It's been about sex: male, female, about age: 18 to 35, 35 to 40 whatever, and very general characteristics about us. Maybe ethnicity, where you live, zip code and stuff. Very general things that you can look up almost publicly. Some of this was collected at the point of sale—when you would check out they'd ask for your ZIP code or something. There were often buttons on the tills, they press the button for male or female checking out. If you go farther back in some countries they would actually have a little pad of paper and write some details down about you every time somebody came and checked out and somebody would manually collect all this. They used this data for direct mailing and sending out coupons and helping the company figure out where people are coming from, very general things. It was a slow expensive process, you didn't get into too much detail. The fact that people have been tracking us in order to sell us things is not a new thing at all.

Daniel: We've had this kind of demographic tracking to market to different areas of people. The digital component of this has allowed that to become more individualized and more personal.

David: It's not just about the individualization but the scale of it also has dramatically increased so it's not just about when you go in and buy something, but even if you go in you don't buy something, if you just look at something, if you walk past the store. All this stuff is now being tracked and categorized. There's so much more data on us, there's so much more information, there are so many more categories they are tracking all this on.

Daniel: What do you mean when you say if we look at something that's being tracked?

David: I spent a lot of time looking at papers, doing research, looking at advertising products and stuff in order to get better idea of just how much this landscape is changing.The change has been dramatic especially in the past 5 years or so. And one of the ways that this landscape has evolved so dramatically is facial tracking and this is something I don't think people realize is as ubiquitous as it is, and is as advanced as it is. We all have a little bit of limited experience with facial tracking on your cell phone or on modern point and shoot cameras you know, you take a picture it has smile detection and facial detection and it automatically focuses on those and that's most people's experience in day-to-day life of facial recognition and how far it's gone. Or maybe if you upload a photo to Facebook or something it'll suggest, "is this person David Torcivia here?" and tag it yes or no, and so people are aware that this technology exists but I don't think they realize how much has entered their everyday life.

Many of these technologies use machine learning which is one of the big buzz words people use these days, and it means more or less that they write this sort of vague algorithm that teaches a piece of software to learn and recognize stuff and then run through lots of emotions called training data and they keep showing pictures and say "this is a happy person" and "this is a sad person" and "this person is angry" and whatever and they keep showing these like very simplistic emotions over and over but hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of different images and letting the computer learn to recognize these things, from all these different points that it tracks and follows on our faces. And over time the software learns to recognize new pictures and new videos that come in and automatically classifies this. And some of these companies advertise this facial recognition tracking services, and not just learning about emotions, but offering data on IQ, on impulsiveness, likely jobs and stuff, and it gets really into these almost pseudoscience phrenology-ess ideas; it's almost like we're back in like the 1920s and there's someone out there with a caliper measuring the size of your skull, deciding if you're like an intelligent person or or Mongol race or something.