a quick note to say--

[kaberett]

In which the Internet is creepy: I spent Thursday & Friday nights at facesfriend's place. At no point did I connect to an internet via my laptop; at no point did I search the 'net for directions; and my phone Doesn't Internet and is in no wise associated with either Google or FB accounts. Most of our IMing is via gchat or IRC. How, then, is it that when I rocked up on facebook a little while ago from the Oxford Tube, it asked me if I lived in Cambridge, London, or facesfriend's area of town? BECAUSE IT HAS NEVER ASKED ME THAT BEFORE and Thursday was at most the second time I have been to that neck of the woods in my life.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Big Data scares me and this is why. See also, the time Facebook asked if I knew one [redacted]. She's my therapist. Facebook should so hella not know who my therapist is.

But I don't know what to do about it except go totally off the Internet grid. And even then they'd still have all the previously collected data, and also so much of my life would lose vital functionality.

[worlds_of_smoke]

Yup, it scares me too. I've made multiple facebook accounts - one with Legal Name, one with Would Be Legal Name if not for $, and one with our name, which has no relation to Legal Name. And even with the third one, they suggested we friend our biomom. The first one and second one I can understand. The first one is, duh, Legal Name.

The second one differs in only first name. Our last name is really rare here in the US, so I can see their algorithms going "oh, well, there's this family of [legal last name], so maybe she's tied to them. :D". (even if biomom doesn't have me and my brothers' last name anymore.) But, weirdly, it hasn't suggested that I follow either of my brothers, so.. IDK.

But the third? There was absolutely no reason to connect that name to the biomom's. It creeped me right the hell out.

[milkymoon]

I wonder if Google and Facebook get data from emails or something. We've had Facebook, Google, LinkedIn etc ask if we know people that we've never talked to on the alternative accounts, or LinkedIn asking for us to add housemates, etc that we'd never contacted using the email associated with LinkedIn (but we have emails aggregated to several accounts so that may be why)...

[alexseanchai]

But of course Google reads our emails! Why would you ever dream they might not?

[milkymoon]

Of course! That's probably why they created an email service in the first place that was nearly too good to be true in the days of Hotmail and Yahoo with their tiny inboxes.

[hairyears]

I don't think they do.

However, they definitely harvest all the metadata; and that's arguably *more* powerful than reading and understanding the text of your emails.

[alexseanchai]

Valid point.

[azurelunatic]

Depends what you mean by "read". I use Gmail, and there are things they do which have to include automatic parsing of the contents, not just metadata. I don't think a person reads it, but I do think it's being read.

[worlds_of_smoke]

Isn't there some sort of way to locate someone based on cell towers? Maybe they pinged your cell tower history and made an assumption? -headskritch-

[spiralsheep]

Or one/more of kaberett's contacts posted something that linked up in some way.

[kaberett]

Nope. Not to my knowledge; like, I don't thiiiiiiiiink most people knew that was a thing that was going to happen? Like I think maybe two people other than us? Neither of whom posted anything in any obvious way...

[spiralsheep]

Apart from maps, no searches for restaurants or events, or even merely checking-in to read while logged in, from you or any contact who was there? Or their phones are leaking location data and you're an associated contact?

[kaberett]

Nope, we stayed in. I didn't use the net at all, facesfriend used the net a bit on his phone but talked about me not at all in so doing and was doing so at home sooooooooo...

[spiralsheep]

Well, given the relative probabilities of (1) a data leak you're unaware of, or (2) facebook's magic scrying powers, I'm still going to assume (1). :-)

[kerrypolka]

Is there a meaningful difference?

[spiralsheep]

Clearly there is to me or I wouldn't have made the distinction. I suspect there's also a meaningful difference to the people who collect this sort of data or they wouldn't spend quite so much time and money on doing it.

[kerrypolka]

I'm confused, sorry! I'm not sure what you mean by 'Facebook's magic scrying powers' in a way that's different than 'Facebook learning a person's location in a way the user doesn't want and can't identify'. I'm also not sure what the difference would be to Facebook since whatever the method, they have the information they want. (I think I'm misreading your tone somewhere to signal meaning but I don't know where!)

[spiralsheep]

It's ok that you don't understand. However, if you're asking me for an explanation of why I think the difference between believing in magic and understanding tech matters then my motivation is to do with the social consequences of accepting magic instead of seeking to understand human behaviours.

One of the problems with believing in magic is that fairy tales aren't generally comfortable places for the peasantry to live in, y'know?

A List of Stuff What I choose Not To Believe, by spiralsheep :-)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The world is the way it is because [magic] and we ordinary people can't understand or change it.

Only people who already have power can understand power and use power.

Everything is predestined by God government the security services big business facebook.

Relax and accept the mysterious magic!

/end list

Also, I don't know you well enough to know whether you'd want this pointed out to you but, as you've asked me twice now to explain to you, "I'm also not sure what the difference would be to Facebook since whatever the method, they have the information they want" is based on a logical fallacy because you began at the end with a conclusion "they already have the information" rather than at the beginning of the process of the how of information gathering (or before that in asking why the information gathering might happen). The world, as currently perceived by humans, doesn't generally start at the end and work backwards so thinking that way about the world will increase the likelihood of coming to unsupported and even false conclusions.

[kerrypolka]

Hmm, that's interesting, thanks! I definitely agree looking behind the curtain is important.

[azurelunatic]

It would be kind of nice to be able to track down said leak and plug it.

[spiralsheep]

Or even merely to know more about the process (because knowledge is power &c).

[kaberett]

Facebook has 0 access to my phone (and doesn't even know my phone number), so that'd be a worrying trick...

[worlds_of_smoke]

Oh, point.

(But not one that I'd expect Facebook to be unable to jump over at some point in the future. :P I trust them about as far as I can throw them.)

[azurelunatic]

I wouldn't bet on it not knowing phone number as long as there are third parties who have facebook on their phones/using facebook as phone book, and those third parties have one's phone number and the email that facebook knows one by in a place that facebook can see.

[astolat]

Not enough info to be sure, but here's my guess -- you connected to Facebook from the Oxford Tube so I'm assuming you mean you were using the wifi at this station? FB could tell via geolocation where you were connecting from, and once it knew you were there, probably it just checked its database and saw that people who connect from that location at that time who have already told FB where they are from, are most often from those places. And it was probably accurate either just because of a lucky guess and/or train arrival patterns. So at a guess, it's not actually as invasive/creepy as it seems, just looks that way thanks to the magic of big data. :P

It's all a bit meta

[hairyears]

Interesting phrase, "Lucky guess".

If I had a hundred little snippets of unrelated information, each of which allowed me to guess 'X' with a 1% probability of being right, I might be lucky about 40% of the time.

If I had thousands of little snippets, and I went looking for patterns that show logical relationships, I might do a bit better.

If I had a complete list of the links between these snippets - and links-of-links, with a few snippets of hard data (A and B and C have followed links to adverts about Mothers' Day cards, D and E did so after an interaction in their immediate circle of links, F and G have identical patterns of communication but no adlink followup, assign probability X that they, too, purchased a card...)

...I might get lucky all the time. Did you buy your Mothers' Day card from John Lewis?

I magine a world in which there are tens of thousands of little snippets about you. And metadata - links-of-links-of-links to people you communicate with - extending to hundreds of people you know, and thousands of people who interact with them.

A tiny fraction of these links land on hard data, like an online purchase, that identifies a mother-daughter relationship at 90% probability. More complex or nebulous relationships - patient-to-therapist, or political associations - don't have that.

However...

Imagine looking for patterns of links, times, places, actions, extending out to see the ripples of links and times and actions in all those people you know, every time you interact online.

And every time your friends act or interact online; and their friends, too: because this is actually about you. Or rather, this is about generating large volumes of low-quality metadata that's 'about you' in the sense that it is slightly relevant to you and usable if it's available in large volumes.

Patterns of possibilities and overlaps and correlations, none of them much over 1% likely to be right, but tens thousands of them exist. Quite possibly, millions, just for you.

And, just once, this web of links and groups and overlaps and shapes and probabalities triggers a routine that says "Ooh that's nearly 0.01% of a match to the relationship pattern 'patient to therapist', look for corroborating evidence in the following related patterns of communication between known therapy patients in their metalinks".

...And there's a reference data set of 30,000 known patient-to-therapist relationships, for patients *in your exact demographic* with a list of all patterns visible in their metadata, to trigger that alert and 'score' the corroborating searches.



It's a staggering amount of data. The metadata analysis algorithms are inhumanly complex, and the hashing functions that permit rapid searching for matches are relatively new - 'new', in the sense that it's economical to run them for everyone, every time, millions of times - but this is the world that we live in right now.

It isn't even necessary to read your emails: arguably, it's less useful, because 'semantic' processing to extract meaning from natural language is much, much harder for a computer than pattern-matching in communications metadata.

Nevertheless, someone's reading your emails, even if it isn't Google. And Google don't throw anything away, ever.





*I'm guessing. 64 just happens to be a really convenient number to use for this kind of thing. And that's the least of the speculations and guesses in this reply.

[davidgillon]

At somewhere out in the sticks, maybe - if I pop up at Chatham, then I've either come from/via Rochester or Gillingham (or walked into the station) with 100% certainty. But Oxford Circus is just too big a nexus of possible start points to get to there, at least IMO. It's a high enough volume you could probably do meaningful traffic analysis on the whole population of data, but linking that back to the individual is problematic if you don't have something else to link them to location X, such as a facesfriend who comes from there....

[syntaxofthings]

FedEx yesterday knew my exact age, previous addresses, and where my mother currently lives in an attempt to verify my identity. More like terrify me.

[kerrypolka]

Last week Google added "Staying at the Ritz" to my calendar for Tuesday-Wednesday, and claimed it had gotten it from an email. I searched my inbox for 'Ritz' and didn't find anything from the past two years. I have no idea where it got that from, but I did feel slightly reassured about how wrong it was.

[spiralsheep]

A new form of paid product placement? ;-)

[geekosaur]

Calendar spam is a thing, sadly. There's a knob (that defaults to on, sadly) for auto-adding calendar items in email.

Mind over Meta

[hairyears]

Interesting.

Take a look at a comment further up - the relevant point being that millions of pattern-matching calculations are carried out 'for' you, every time something linked to you pops up on line.

And every time a pattern of links-to-links-to-links to things and people pops up online, loosely-related to you, even if the data quality of any individual event or observed correlation is absurdly low.



The hashing functions that do these speed-lookups for matched patterns in the metadata do give false matches from time to time. As in once in every trillion comparisons or so - which, given the sheer number of calculations they run, makes once-in-a-year for a visible error entiely unsurprising.

Nevertheless, I'd go looking for the privacy setting that stops the bastards placing promotional items in your calendar. Even if that dinner at the Ritz was someone else's.

[davidgillon]

Possibilities that occur to me:
Unacknowledged metadata sharing between telcos and google/FB. (This makes a scary amount of sense from the Google/FB point of view, and ditto for the telcos if Google/FB are willing to pay enough).
You might not have connected to the internet, but did your laptop? It doesn't even necessarily have to be a full handshake, just ping out an 'I'm here' message. I've generally concluded it's impossible to know what any tool on my PC is doing unless I built it myself (and as I think that's too much like hard work I should be paid for...)
Friends' son starts new job as a 'data scientist' next week, can't wait to hear what scarily invasive analysis of daily life he's actually doing.

[silveradept]

Some location things don't need you to connect, merely just to be in the presence of a signal, which they notate, collect, and then send along to the mothership when you are actually connected. It's quite insidious.

[khronos_keeper]

Oh, it's okay! See, gchat gets saved in logs the way that emails do, so they're also searchable by google's personalized search algorithms. Also, if your phone is in anyway listed on Google or FB or any social media sites, they can probably cross link which cell towers your phone signal bounces off of? And finally, different social media sites and Google analyze your social network compared to what they can glean from your physical location.

However, finally, in terms of FB asking you if you were from Cambridge when you were in Oxford, since areas like that tend to be shit in terms of reliably geolocating your IP ping, they tend to extrapolate to the nearest town. If you'd reloaded, it probably would have asked you if you were from X town/city relatively nearby as well.

Sorry, I'm American and marginally affiliated with intelligence/security stuff, so I'm a bit less scared than most, mostly by way of a.) I'm resigned to its omnipresence and b.) entertained by its real life fallibility. :D

[emceeaich]

Too many web pages load Facebook's scripts (for comments, single sign on, or just plain people stalking) so even if you didn't sign on to FB, you probably loaded a Facebook asset (single pixel gif, or javascript) and if you had any FB cookies, and there'd be enough info there on the basis of IP address to geolocate.

I'd recommend running the Ad Block Plus and Ghostery extensions and frequently updating them, they can stop sites from side loading Facebook assets.

Also, if you absolutely have to use Facebook, do it in a separate browser that is only used to look at Facebook, and delete all data (if you are feeling sufficiently burn-it-it with fire, use a virtual machine instance that gets deleted every time.)

[kaberett]

I do in fact already have AdBlock Plus and Ghostery installed on all my machines!