Today, Tuesday, March 28th 2017, there’s about to be a congressional vote on the right to sell browsing information.
At the same time, “Trump Officials are purging electronic devices” and there’s a record seizure of devices and demand for passwords at our borders. Not to mention: Russia and it’s tampering in our election.
There’s talk of the EFF and VPNs and Tor, the Internet, shadows of Snowden and Manning and Assange and Anonymous. Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, the NSA are all collecting unfathomable amounts of information and the average smart phone is a pocket sized personal computer fountain of personal information over which the voluntary or involuntary surrender of data is under assault. The phenomenon isn’t just local, national, it’s global, worldwide 24/7/365.
I’m posting this on Daily Kos. I’m pretty sure there are right wing and fringe wing boards and forums contributing to the overwhelming volume of information as well. Google Ads get in the way of simple searches in search of potential clients and consumers. Everywhere someone is proposing online solutions — JOIN, SUBSCRIBE, LIKE. The Cloud. No more ethereal than wireless. All those communication towers trying to blend in. All those data farms in search of natural cooling solutions and remote locations.
“Facebook is collecting your data — 500 terabytes a day”
https://gigaom.com/2012/08/22/facebook-is-collecting-your-data-500-terabytes-a-day/
That was 2012 — 5 years ago.
Perspective:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/memory-sizes-gigabytes-terabytes-petabytes/
Bits, bytes, kilobytes, gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes
“Well, 1 TB = 1,024 GB = 1,048,576 MB = 1,073,741,824 KB = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. In other words, a 1 TB hard drive has the capacity to hold a trillion bytes. That’s a far step up from floppy disks that only held thousands of bytes.
Do you remember CD-ROMs? Way back before mp3 players and iPods and smartphones, music used to be sold and purchased on plastic laser-etched circles that would spin. These discs were large enough to hold 700 MB. How does that compare to the 1 TB hard drives of today?
You would need approximately 1,500 CD-ROMs to match the capacity of a 1 TB hard drive. Now, let’s say that the dimensions of a CD case are 142 mm x 125 mm x 8 mm (yes, I measured). If you stacked 1,500 CD cases on top of one another – and kept it from toppling over – it would reach a height of 12 meters, or 39 feet. You can enjoy all of that memory space within a compact metallic storage device now. Impressive.”
And a petabyte is 1024 terabytes.
Four years ago:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/the-1-6-percent-of-the-internet-that-nsa-touches-is-bigger-than-it-seems/
“According to figures published by a major tech provider, the Internet carries 1,826 Petabytes of information per day. In its foreign intelligence mission, NSA touches about 1.6 percent of that. However, of the 1.6 percent of the data, only 0.025 percent is actually selected for review. The net effect is that NSA analysts look at 0.00004 percent of the world's traffic in conducting their mission—that's less than one part in a million. Put another way, if a standard basketball court represented the global communications environment, NSA's total collection would be represented by an area smaller than a dime on that basketball court.”
Every post, blog, diary, search, comment, page, picture, video contributes to that.
Point here being, it’s no longer a matter of politics and technology as separate and distinct entities.
One can certainly look at “Big Data” as the enemy. It overlooks the extent to which we willingly surrender our information on a daily basis.
I’ve made the point before, elsewhere. It’s NOT that data shouldn’t be collected. It IS. It’s long overdue to have a serious discussion about HOW that data is used. To have a better understanding of, or formation of governing bodies. We can continue on our merry way and have the decisions made FOR us. We can suffer the consequences OR we can incorporate technology into the discussions.
I’m inclined to think that there can be good and useful purposes for big data. Used wisely it can help to avoid a considerable amount of repetition and regurgitation of the same data over and over and over again by sources unwilling to share information due to (not unreasonable or unwarranted) concerns of privacy or in attempts to maintain a certain level of proprietary access, ownership. And by the rest of us, quoting, sourcing — a collective echo chamber. Even those quoting themselves after it’s been picked up by (leaked to) a “credible source”.
The extent and magnitude of which data is being shared, accessed and acquired should be an indicator of the extent to which lines are being blurred, illusions maintained and shattered.
It’s no longer just about the latest vote on privacy, the actions of the FCC, the latest hack, Russia, Snowden, Manning, Assange, smart phones, social media. It’s about getting a handle on the sheer volume of data being generated, the actors, the players, and whatever limits we’d like to have on the use of that data.
It seems like what could be a force for good is spiraling out of control and before we know it, we’ll be having the kind of conversations about data that we’re having about our current president, asking how did we get to this point, what went wrong and what can we do about it.
I have no idea what virtual catastrophe will precipitate that discussion, but, like race and a lot of other issues simmering in the political pot, seems to me, this is one that deserves more attention.
I think the EFF has a consumers bill of rights in this regard, that could be a springboard to a broader discussion, plan of action on this:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/03/best-practices-respect-mobile-user-bill-rights
This focuses on Mobile rights. I think it should be expanded to include electronic data, whatever its source.
Certainly the extent to which it is now becoming an integral component of our political process (Tweets anyone?), is an indicator of just how big a potential problem we’re looking at.
This is a dam that is leaking on a VERY LARGE scale.
I think we should be about fixing it.