The Fight to Mine Your Data and Sell It to Your Boss
The poignant part of the headline here is &quot;sell it to your boss&quot;. I think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is happening, and will continue to happen and it seems to me there is really nothing we can do short of drastically restructuring the entire Internet.<p>The biggest problem is when you combine intrusive massive surveillance with a ultra-powerful entity that can be capricious, malicious, and often abuses and punishes its underlings. This is why I am far more concerned (as a selfish American, thinking for now only about the concerns of Americans) about the FBI having unlimited surveillance powers than the NSA: the FBI has a history of committing crime, horrifying suppression of speech, dissents, political movements, of destroying the lives of innocents, etc. The FBI can knock on your door with guns and throw in you a cage for decades. It has massive power over us so it is important we do not give it massive information about us at the same time.<p>The same is true with bosses. One technique to deal with this is to try and firewall the information off away from the powerful. This is what we did to the FBI before parallel construction (bills that say data will be collected &quot;only for terrorism&quot; -- a lie, obviously, as it always is, but one that made the collection palatable). The article focuses on this approach, which is in my view a lost cause, but a lost cause worth fighting for nonetheless.<p>The other approach is to take away power from bosses. Right now a boss has complete and total power over his employees without labor unions or worker protections (i.e. the current state of affairs in the US). It is this combination with the information that is so disgusting and dystopian. So we could, instead, talk about taking away the <i>power</i>, rather than taking away the <i>information</i> -- which would have the added benefit of solving many other social problems along the way.