05.13.06

NSA and Telephones and Aggregate Data

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:33 pm by admin

“We are not mining or trawling through the personal lives of innocent Americans” says our President. I for one am skeptical, not only of this assertion, but that Bush is casually familiar with the term “mining” used in a database context. Perhaps I underestimate his techno-literacy, but I think much is revealed in his choice of words here. He is evidently (if perhaps belatedly) in the know and denying exactly that which they are doing. The claim is that the phone records are stripped on identifying information, as though that makes it impossible to correlate names and numbers and therefore qualifies the information as aggregate data. What a laugh. Surely Mr. Bush with his newfound database savvy is aware that you can do a series of reverse lookups.

TiVo is guilty of this slight of hand too. I love my TiVo, and maybe that is why I’m initially somewhat more tolerant of the idea that they are marketing shows to me based on the shows I already watch. They too claim to interpret data only in the aggregate. Aggregate>Profile>Identity. On the other hand, would I want them to turn over to the government the contents of my Season Passes, or better yet the Keywords I use to mark don’t-miss tv topics? My intuitive response is that tv is frivolous and trivial and so who who cares if anyone knows what I watch. On the other hand, do I really want to dismiss an entire, incredibly powerful media genre on that that basis? What is chilling isn’t so much the individual moment that “Hey, I like Law and Order: SV AND Law and Order: Criminal Intent so must be interested in police procedurals in a potentially suspicious way”–but the principles at stake. The extent to which consumers are already profiled into niche groups is fascinating and something I’d like to explore further.

05.04.06

Linus Van Pelt

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:40 am by admin

My hero.

Bunnies

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:29 am by admin

I have been told my postings are too cynical. So now I’m going to write about bunnies. Bunnies are interesting creatures. They are mythologized as symbols of fertility, make no noise, and tend to have very long ears in cartoon representations. Except for dust bunnies. Why are they called bunnies? Well, they are quiet. I guess if you squint into the light you *might* see some long ears. Or at least fluffy tails. Maybe they are all retreating tails, fleeing the broom.

When I used to get chocolate bunnies at Easter I’d try to avoid eating the face as long as possible. Other people would fetishize the ears; I’d fetishize the eyes. Pitiful, staring button candy eyes. Maybe it would have been better to have eaten the eyes first so they couldn’t see what was coming. Maybe this is why I became a vegetarian. And here I thought it was my stint at Burger King. It all goes waaaay back to chocoloate bunnies.

And inflatable bunnies. My brother and I had inflatable bunnies. We’d blow them up for the holiday and then they’d gradually collapse as the day wore on. By the end of the day the sugar high would crash along with Fluffy and Peter. Those weird inflatable snowmen you see nowadays in people’s yards are even more crushing. They only get to come to life for a few hours at night when people are cruising around looking at each other’s yard trash. In the day, Snowie takes a break. Kind of like Santa taking a swig between kiddies.

I’m making myself sad now. Bunnies. Why do people put bunnies in hutches in the backyard? What is with these special wire cages? I hear that bunnies can be decent house pets, except for maybe the pellets. OK, I might be making that part up. But what about Irontail, or the Blue-Tail Bunny? Bunnies are everyone. Playboy bunnies aren’t really fertility goddesses though–mainly they represent irresponsible cavorting. Then again, maybe that is what being a bunny is really all about. As distinct from rabbits, hares, and coneys, each of whom has their own associations.

What is the sound of one bunny snuffling?

The three running rabbits motif is found all over the world, I learned recently. We are all united in the ears of the bunnies.
Three Hares Project

The Easter Beagle. Now that truly makes me happy, registered trademarks or no.

Health Insurance and “Wellness”

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:16 am by admin

On a vaguely related paranoid topic–what’s with these “Wellness” programs that insurance companies are offering? Log in, enter some vital stats, and then have the program tell you whether or not you have health risks. NOT that the insurance company would *ever* dream of actually looking at the data you have posted indicating that you suffer from high blood pressure, depression, or fainting fits. Oh no; that is an entirely separate system. Aggregate data only– fine tuned enough so that you and two similarly profiled individuals have the same anonymized rate increases and denials of coverage down the line. I wish I could believe that this is all enlightened self interest on the part of these companies–pay for a web database to churn out suggestions that you eat more vegetables in the hopes that they won’t have to pay for your angioplasty later—but it is hard not to think in more dire TIA, personalized ways about what is happening. Niche anti-marketing. Unwell specimens need not apply.

Blogs

Posted in Uncategorized at 5:12 am by admin

Blogs, podcasts, vlogs—everybody has a medium, but does anyone have a message? Search engines are inadequate to deal with the deluge. Data mining needs considerable help to find anything useful. Soon we’ll start paying people to monitor blogs for us. Oh, wait, we do that already, don’t we. Subscription news services. Maybe people can vet the information for us, cull it down to a few relevant samples. Actually, if they could then print it out and send it to our houses, wouldn’t that be convenient? The batteries last for a looong time in a magazine. Ok, no backlight though. Or, we could just have some agents conveniently watching what we do on the web, tracking our interests, and then spilling them back to us in the form of inline ads, or even coupons. Isn’t that handy?