Data Science at Home

WARNING!! Neural networks can memorize secrets (ep. 100)

One of the best features of neural networks and machine learning models is to memorize patterns from training data and apply those to unseen observations. That's where the magic is. However, there are scenarios in which the same machine learning models learn patterns so well such that they can disclose some of the data they have been trained on. This phenomenon goes under the name of unintended memorization and it is extremely dangerous.
Think about a language generator that discloses the passwords, the credit card numbers and the social security numbers of the records it has been trained on. Or more generally, think about a synthetic data generator that can disclose the training data it is trying to protect. 
In this episode I explain why unintended memorization is a real problem in machine learning. Except for differentially private training there is no other way to mitigate such a problem in realistic conditions.At Pryml we are very aware of this. Which is why we have been developing a synthetic data generation technology that is not affected by such an issue.
 
This episode is supported by Harmonizely. Harmonizely lets you build your own unique scheduling page based on your availability so you can start scheduling meetings in just a couple minutes.Get started by connecting your online calendar and configuring your meeting preferences.Then, start sharing your scheduling page with your invitees!
 
References
The Secret Sharer: Evaluating and Testing Unintended Memorization in Neural Networkshttps://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity19/presentation/carlini

Attacks to machine learning model: inferring ownership of training data (Ep. 99)

In this episode I explain a very effective technique that allows one to infer the membership of any record at hand to the (private) training dataset used to train the target model. The effectiveness of such technique is due to the fact that it works on black-box models of which there is no access to the data used for training, nor model parameters and hyperparameters. Such a scenario is very realistic and typical of machine learning as a service APIs. 
This episode is supported by pryml.io, a platform I am personally working on that enables data sharing without giving up confidentiality. 
 
As promised below is the schema of the attack explained in the episode.
 
 
References
Membership Inference Attacks Against Machine Learning Models
 
 

Don't be naive with data anonymization (Ep. 98)

Masking, obfuscating, stripping, shuffling. All the above techniques try to do one simple thing: keeping the data private while sharing it with third parties. Unfortunately, they are not the silver bullet to confidentiality. All the players in the synthetic data space rely on simplistic techniques that are not secure, might not be compliant and risky for production. At pryml we do things differently. 

Why sharing real data is dangerous (Ep. 97)

There are very good reasons why a financial institution should never share their data. Actually, they should never even move their data. Ever.In this episode I explain you why.
 
 

Building reproducible machine learning in production (Ep. 96)

Building reproducible models is essential for all those scenarios in which the lead developer is collaborating with other team members. Reproducibility in machine learning shall not be an art, rather it should be achieved via a methodical approach. In this episode I give a few suggestions about how to make your ML models reproducible and keep your workflow as smooth.
Enjoy the show!Come visit us on our discord channel and have a chat

Bridging the gap between data science and data engineering: metrics (Ep. 95)

Data science and data engineering are usually two different departments in organisations. Bridging the gap between the two is essential to success. Many times the brilliant applications created by data scientists don't find a match in production, just because they are not production-ready.
In this episode I have a talk with Daan Gerits, co-founder and CTO at Pryml.io
 

A big welcome to Pryml: faster machine learning applications to production (Ep. 94)

Why so much silence? Building a company! That's why :) I am building pryml, a platform that allows data scientists build their applications on data they cannot get access to. This is the first of a series of episodes in which I will speak about the technology and the challenges we are facing while we build it. 
Happy listening and stay tuned!

It's cold outside. Let's speak about AI winter (Ep. 93)

In the last episode of 2019 I speak with Filip Piekniewski about some of the most worth noting findings in AI and machine learning in 2019. As a matter of fact, the entire field of AI has been inflated by hype and claims that are hard to believe. A lot of the promises made a few years ago have revealed quite hard to achieve, if not impossible. Let's stay grounded and realistic on the potential of this amazing field of research, not to bring disillusion in the near future.
Join us to our Discord channel to discuss your favorite episode and propose new ones. I would like to thank all of you for supporting and inspiring us. I wish you a wonderful 2020!Francesco and the team of Data Science at Home

The dark side of AI: bias in the machine (Ep. 92)

 
This is the fourth and last episode of mini series "The dark side of AI". I am your host Francesco and I’m with Chiara Tonini from London. The title of today’s episode is Bias in the machine 
 
 
C: Francesco, today we are starting with an infuriating discussion. Are you ready to be angry? 
 
F: yeah sure is this about brexit? No, I don’t talk about that. In 1986 the New York City’s Rockefeller University conducted a study on breast and uterine cancers and their link to obesity. Like in all clinical trials up to that point, the subjects of the study were all men. So Francesco, do you see a problem with this approach? 
 
F: No problem at all, as long as those men had a perfectly healthy uterus.In medicine, up to the end of the 20th century, medical studies and clinical trials were conducted on men, medicine dosage and therapy calculated on men (white men). The female body has historically been considered an exception, or variation, from a male body. 
 
F: Like Eve coming from Adam’s rib. I thought we were past that...When the female body has been under analysis, the focus was on the difference between it and the male body, the so-called “bikini approach”: the reproductive organs are different, therefore we study those, and those only. For a long time medicine assumed this was the only difference. 
 
Oh good ...This has led to a hugely harmful fallout across society. Because women had reproductive organs, they should reproduce, and all else about them was deemed uninteresting. Still today, they consider a woman without children somehow to have betrayed her biological destiny. This somehow does not apply to a man without children, who also has reproductive organs. 
 
F: so this is an example of a very specific type of bias in medicine, regarding clinical trials and medical studies, that is not only harmful for the purposes of these studies, but has ripple effects in all of societyOnly in the 2010 a serious conversation has started about the damage caused by not including women in clinical trials. There are many many examples (which we list in the references for this episode). 
 
Give me oneResearchers consider cardiovascular disease a male disease - they even call it “the widower”. They conduct studies on male samples. But it turns out, the symptoms of a heart attack, especially the ones leading up to one, are different in women. This led to doctors not recognising or dismissing the early symptoms in women. 
 
F: I was reading that women are also subject to chronic pain much more than men: for example migraines, and pain related to endometriosis. But there is extensive evidence now of doctors dismissing women’s pain, as either imaginary, or “inevitable”, like it is a normal state of being and does not need a cure at all. 
 
The failure of the medical community as a whole to recognise this obvious bias up to the 21st century is an example of how insidious the problem of bias is.
 
There are 3 fundamental types of bias: 
 
One: Stochastic drift: you train your model on a dataset, and you validate the model on a split of the training set. When you apply your model out in the world, you systematically add bias in the predictions due to the training data being too specific
Two: The bias in the model, introduced by your choice of the parameters of your model.  
Three: The bias in your training sample: people put training samples together, and people have culture, experience, and prejudice. As we will see today, this is the most dangerous and subtle bias. Today we’ll talk about this bias.
 
Bias is a warping of our understanding of reality. We see reality through the lens of our experience and our culture. The origin of bias can date back to traditions going back centuries, and is so ingrained in our way of thinking, that we don’t even see it anymore. 
 
F: And let me add, when it comes to machine learning, we see reality through the lens of data. Bias is everywhere, and we could spend hours and hours talking about it. It’s complicated. 
 
It’s about to become more complicated. 
 
F: of course, if I know you…Let’s throw artificial intelligence in the mix. 
 
F: You know, there was a happier time when this sentence didn’t fill me with a sense of dread... ImageNet is an online database of over 14 million photos, compiled more than a decade ago at Stanford University. They used it to train machine learning algorithms for image recognition and computer vision, and played an important role in the rise of deep learning. We’ve all played with it, right? The cats and dogs classifier when learning Tensorflow? (I am a dog by the way. )
 
F: ImageNet has been a critical asset for computer-vision research. There was an annual international competition to create algorithms that could most accurately label subsets of images. In 2012, a team from the University of Toronto used a Convolutional Neural Network to handily win the top prize. That moment is widely considered a turning point in the development of contemporary AI. The final year of the ImageNet competition was 2017, and accuracy in classifying objects in the limited subset had risen from 71% to 97%. But that subset did not include the “Person” category, where the accuracy was much lower... ImageNet contained photos of thousands of people, with labels. This included straightforward tags like “teacher,” “dancer” and “plumber”, as well as highly charged labels like “failure, loser” and “slut, slovenly woman, trollop.”
 
F: Uh Oh. Then “ImageNet Roulette” was created, by an artist called Trevor Paglen and a Microsoft researcher named Kate Crawford. It was a digital art project, where you could upload your photo and let the classifier identify you, based on the labels of the database. Imagine how well that went. 
 
F: I bet it did’t workOf course it didn’t work. Random people were classified as “orphans” or “non-smoker” or “alcoholic”. Somebody with glasses was a “nerd”. Tabong Kima, a 24-year old African American, was classified as “offender” and “wrongdoer”. 
 
F: and there it is. Quote from Trevor Paglen: “We want to show how layers of bias and racism and misogyny move from one system to the next. The point is to let people see the work that is being done behind the scenes, to see how we are being processed and categorized all the time.”
 
F: The ImageNet labels were applied by thousands of unknown people, most likely in the United States, hired by the team from Stanford, and working through the crowdsourcing service Amazon Mechanical Turk. They earned pennies for each photo they labeled, churning through hundreds of labels an hour. The labels were not verified in any way : if a labeler thought someone looks “shady”, this label is just a result of their prejudice, but has no basis in reality.As they did, biases were baked into the database. Paglen quote again: “The way we classify images is a product of our worldview,” he said. “Any kind of classification system is always going to reflect the values of the person doing the classifying.” They defined what a “loser” looked like. And a “slut.” And a “wrongdoer.”
 
F: The labels originally came from another sprawling collection of data called WordNet, a kind of conceptual dictionary for machines built by researchers at Princeton University in the 1980s. But with these inflammatory labels included, the Stanford researchers may not have realized what they were doing.What is happening here is the transferring of bias from one system to the next. 
 
Tech jobs, in past decades but still today, predominantly go to white males from a narrow social class. Inevitably, they imprint the technology with their worldview. So their algorithms learn that a person of color is a criminal, and a woman with a certain look is a slut. 
 
I’m not saying they do it on purpose, but the lack of diversity in the tech industry translates into a narrower world view, which has real consequences in the quality of AI systems. 
 
F: Diversity in tech teams is often framed as an equality issue (which of course it is), but there are enormous advantages in it: it allows to create that cognitive diversity that will reflect into superior products or services. I believe this is an ongoing problem. In recent months, researchers have shown that face-recognition services from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and IBM can be biased against women and people of color. 
 
Crawford and Paglen argue this: “In many narratives around AI it is assumed that ongoing technical improvements will resolve all problems and limitations. But what if the opposite is true? What if the challenge of getting computers to “describe what they see” will always be a problem? The automated interpretation of images is an inherently social and political project, rather than a purely technical one. Understanding the politics within AI systems matters more than ever, as they are quickly moving into the architecture of social institutions: deciding whom to interview for a job, which students are paying attention in class, which suspects to arrest, and much else.”
 
F: You are using the words “interpretation of images” here, as opposed to “description” or “classification”. Certain images depict something concrete, with an objective reality. Like an apple. But other images… not so much? 
 
ImageNet contain images only corresponding to nouns (not verbs for example). Noun categories such as “apple” are well defined. But not all nouns are created equal. Linguist George Lakoff points out that the concept of an “apple” is more nouny than the concept of “light”, which in turn is more nouny than a concept such as “health.” Nouns occupy various places on an axis from concrete to abstract, and from descriptive to judgmental. The images corresponding to these nouns become more and more ambiguous.These gradients have been erased in the logic of ImageNet. Everything is flattened out and pinned to a label. The results can be problematic, illogical, and cruel, especially when it comes to labels applied to people. 
 
F: so when an image is interpreted as Drug Addict, Crazy, Hypocrite, Spinster, Schizophrenic, Mulatto, Red Neck… this is not an objective description of reality, it’s somebody’s worldview coming to the surface. The selection of images for these categories skews the meaning in ways that are gendered, racialized, ableist, and ageist. ImageNet is an object lesson in what happens when people are categorized like objects. And this practice has only become more common in recent years, often inside the big AI companies, where there is no way for outsiders to see how images are being ordered and classified. 
 
The bizarre thing about these systems is that they remind of early 20th century criminologists like Lombroso, or phrenologists (including Nazi scientists), and physiognomy in general. This was a discipline founded on the assumption that there is a relationship between an image of a person and the character of that person. If you are a murderer, or a Jew, the shape of your head for instance will tell. 
 
F: In reaction to these ideas, Rene’ Magritte produced that famous painting of the pipe with the tag “This is not a pipe”.
 
You know that famous photograph of the soldier kissing the nurse at the end of the second world war? The nurse came public about it when she was like 90 years old, and told how this total stranger in the street had grabbed her and kissed her. This is a picture of sexual harassment. And knowing that, it does not seem romantic anymore. 
 
F: not romantic at all indeedImages do not describe themselves. This is a feature that artists have explored for centuries. We see those images differently when we see how they’re labeled. The correspondence between image, label, and referent is fluid. What’s more, those relations can change over time as the cultural context of an image shifts, and can mean different things depending on who looks, and where they are located. Images are open to interpretation and reinterpretation. Entire subfields of philosophy, art history, and media theory are dedicated to teasing out all the nuances of the unstable relationship between images and meanings.The common mythos of AI and the data it draws on, is that they are objectively and scientifically classifying the world. But it’s not true, everywhere there is politics, ideology, prejudices, and all of the subjective stuff of history. 
 
F: When we survey the most widely used training sets, we find that this is the rule rather than the exception.Training sets are the foundation on which contemporary machine-learning systems are built. They are central to how AI systems recognize and interpret the world.By looking at the construction of these training sets and their underlying structures, we discover many unquestioned assumptions that are shaky and skewed. These assumptions inform the way AI systems work—and fail—to this day.And the impenetrability of the algorithms, the impossibility of reconstructing the decision-making of a NN, hides the bias further away from scrutiny. When an algorithm is a black box and you can’t look inside, you have no way of analysing its bias. 
 
And the skewness and bias of these algorithms have real effects in society, the more you use AI in the judicial system, in medicine, the job market, in security systems based on facial recognition, the list goes on and on. 
 
Last year Google unveiled BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). It’s an AI system that learns to talk: it’s a Natural Language Processing engine to generate written (or spoken) language. 
 
F: we have an episode  in which we explain all that
 
They trained it from lots and lots of digitized information, as varied as old books, Wikipedia entries and news articles. They baked decades and even centuries of biases — along with a few new ones — into all that material. So for instance BERT is extremely sexist: it associates with male almost all professions and positive attributes (except for “mom”). 
 
BERT is widely used in industry and academia. For example it can interpret news headlines automatically. Even Google’s search engine use it. 
 
Try googling “CEO”, and you get out a gallery of images of old white men.
 
F: such a pervasive and flawed AI system can propagate inequality at scale. And it’s super dangerous because it’s subtle. Especially in industry, query results will not be tested and examined for bias. AI is a black box and researchers take results at face value. 
 
There are many cases of algorithm-based discrimination in the job market. Targeting candidates for tech jobs for instance, may be done by algorithms that will not recognise women as potential candidates. Therefore, they will not be exposed to as many job ads as men. Or, automated HR systems will rank them lower (for the same CV) and screen them out. 
 
In the US, algorithms are used to calculate bail. The majority of the prison population in the US is composed of people of colour, as a result of a systemic bias that goes back centuries. An algorithm learns that a person of colour is more likely to commit a crime, is more likely to not be able to afford bail, is more likely to violate parole. Therefore, people of colour will receive harsher punishments for the same crime. This amplifies this inequality at scale. 
 
Conclusion
 
Question everything, never take predictions of your models at face value. Always question how your training samples have been put together, who put them together, when and in what context. Always remember that your model produces an interpretation of reality, not a faithful depiction. Treat reality responsibly. 
 

The dark side of AI: metadata and the death of privacy (Ep. 91)

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Join the discussion about data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence on our Discord server
 
Episode transcript
We always hear the word “metadata”, usually in a sentence that goes like this
 
Your Honor, I swear, we were not collecting users data, just metadata.
 
Usually the guy saying this sentence is Zuckerberg, but could be anybody from Amazon or Google. “Just” metadata, so no problem. This is one of the biggest lies about the reality of data collection.
 
F: Ok the first question is, what the hell is metadata? 
 
Metadata is data about data. 
 
F: Ok… still not clear.Imagine you make a phone call to your mum. How often do you call your mum, Francesco?F: Every day of course! (coughing)
 
Good boy! Ok, so let’s talk about today’s phone call. Let’s call “data” the stuff that you and your mum actually said. What did you talk about? 
 
F: She was giving me the recipe for her famous lasagna. 
So your mum’s lasagna is the DATA. What is the metadata of this phone call? The lasagna has data of its own attached to it: the date and time when the conversation happened, the duration of the call, the unique hardware identifiers of your phone and your mum’s phone, the identifiers of the two sim cards, the location of the cell towers that pinged the call, the GPS coordinates of the phones themselves. 
 
F: yeah well, this lasagna comes with a lot of data :) 
And this is assuming that this data is not linked to any other data like your Facebook account or your web browsing history. More of that later. 
 
F: Whoa Whoa Whoa, ok. Let’s put a pin in that. Going back to the “basic” metadata that you describe. I think we understand the concept of data about data. I am sure you did your research and you would love to paint me a dystopian nightmare, as always. Tell us why is this a big deal? 
 
Metadata is a very big deal. In fact, metadata is far more “useful” than the actual data, where by “useful” I mean that it allows a third party to learn about you and your whole life. What I am saying is, the fact that you talk with your mum every day for 15 minutes is telling me more about you than the content of the actual conversations. In a way, the content does not matter. Only the metadata matters. 
 
F: Ok, can you explain this point a bit more? 
 
Imagine this scenario: you work in an office in Brussels, and you go by car. Every day, you use your time in the car while you go home to call your mum. So every day around 6pm, a cell tower along the path from your office to your home pings a call from your phone to your mum’s phone. Someone who is looking at your metadata, knows exactly where you are while you call your mum. Every day you will talk about something different, and it doesn't really matter.  Your location will come through loud and clear. A lot of additional information can be deduced from this too: for example, you are moving along a motorway, therefore you have a car. The metadata of a call to mum now becomes information on where you are at 6pm, and the way you travel. 
 
F: I see. So metadata about the phone call is, in fact, real data about me. 
 
Exactly. YOU are what is interesting, not your mum’s lasagna.
 
F: you say so because you haven’t tried my mum’s lasagna. But I totally get your point.
 
Now, imagine that one day, instead of going straight home, you decide to go somewhere else. Maybe you are secretly looking for another job. Your metadata is recording the fact that after work you visit the offices of a rival company. Maybe you are a journalist and you visit your anonymous source. Your metadata records wherever you go, and one of these places is your secret meeting with your source. Anyone’s metadata can be combined with yours. There will be someone who was with you at the time and place of your secret meeting. Anyone who comes in contact with you can be tagged and monitored. Now their anonymity has been reduced. 
 
F: I get it. So, compared to the content of my conversation, its metadata contains more actionable information. And this is the most useful, and most precious, kind of information about me. What I do, what I like, who I am, beyond the particular conversation. 
 
Precisely. If companies like Facebook or the phone companies had the explicit permission to collect all the users’ data, including all content of conversations, it’s still the metadata that would  generate the most actionable information. They would probably throw the content of conversations away. In the vast majority of instances, the content does not matter. Unless you are an actual spy talking about state secrets, nobody cares. 
 
F: Let’s stay on the spy point for a minute. One could say, So what? As I have heard this many times. So what if my metadata contains actionable information, and there are entities that collect it. If I am an honest person, I have nothing to hide. 
 
There are two aspects to the problem of privacy. Government surveillance, and corporate - in other words private - surveillance. Government surveillance is a topic that has been covered flawlessly by Edward Snowden in his book “Permanent Record”, and in the documentary about his activity, “Citizenfour”. Which I both recommend, and in fact I think every data scientist should read and watch. Let’s just briefly mention the obvious: just because something comes from a government, it does not mean it’s legal or legitimate, or even ethical or moral. What if your government is corrupt, or authoritarian. What if you are a dissident and you are fighting for human rights. What if you are a journalist, trying to uncover government corruption. 
 
F: In other words,  it is a false equivalence to say that protecting your privacy has anything to do with having something to hide.
 
Mass surveillance of private citizens without cause is a danger to individual freedom as well as civil liberties. Government exists to serve its citizens, not the other way around. To freely paraphrase Snowden, as individuals have no power compared to the government, the only way the system works is if the government is completely transparent to the citizens, so that they can collectively change it, and at the same time the single citizens are opaque to the government, so that it cannot abuse its power. But today the opposite happens: we citizens are completely naked and exposed in front of a completely opaque government machine, with secret surveillance programs on us, that we don’t even know exist. We are not free to self-determine, or do anything about government power, really.
 
 F: We could really talk for days and days about government mass surveillance. But let’s go back to metadata, and let’s talk about the commercial use of it. Metadata for sale. You mentioned this term, “corporate surveillance”. It sounds…. Ominous. 
 
We live in privacy hell, Francesco. 
 
F: I get that. According to your research, where can we find metadata?  
 
First of all, metadata is everywhere. We are swimming in it. In each and every interaction between two people, that make use of digital technology, metadata is generated automatically, without the user’s consent. When two people interact, two machines also interact, recording the “context” of this interaction. Who we are, when, where, why, what we want. F: And that doesn’t seem avoidable. In fact metadata must be generated by devices and software to just work properly. I look at it as an intrinsic component that cannot be removed from the communication system, whatever it is. The problem is who owns it. So tell me, who has such data? 
 
It does not matter, because it’s all for sale. Which means, we are for sale. 
 
F: Ok, holy s**t, this keeps getting darker. Let’s have a practical example, shall we? 
 
Have you booked a flight recently? 
 
F: Yep. I’m going to Berlin, and in fact so are you. For a hackathon, no less. 
 
Have you ever heard of a company called Adara? 
 
F: No… Cannot say that I have. 
 
Adara is a “Predictive Traveler Intelligence” company. 
 
F: sounds pretty pretentious. Kinda douchy. 
 
This came up on the terrifying twitter account of Wolfie Christl, author among other things of a great report about corporate surveillance for Cracked Labs. Go check him out on twitter, he’s great. 
 
F: Sure I will add what I find to the show notes of this episode. Oh and by the way you can find all this stuff on datascienceathome.com Sorry go ahead. 
 
Adara collects data - metadata - about travel-related online searches, purchases, devices, passenger records, loyalty program records. Data from clients that include major airlines, major airports, hotel chains and car rental chains. It creates a profile, a “traveler graph” in real time, for 750 million people around the world. A profile based on personal identifiers. 
 
F: uhh uhh Then what?
 
Then Adara sells these profiles. 
 
F: Ok… I have to say, the box that I tick giving consent to the third-party use of my personal data when I use an airline website does not quite convey how far my data actually goes. 
 
Consent. LOL. Adara calculates a: “traveler value score” based on customer behaviour and needs across the global travel ecosystem, over time.
 
The score is in the Salesforce Service Cloud, for sale to anyone. This score, and your profile, determine the personalisation of travel offers and treatment, before purchase, during booking, post purchase, at check in, in airport, at destination. In their own website, Adara explains how customer service agents for their myriad of clients - for example a front desk agent at a hotel - can instantly see the Traveler value score. Therefore they will treat you differently based on this score. 
 
 
 
F: Oh so if you have money to spend they will treat you differently
 
The score is used to assess your potential value, to inform service and customer service strategies for you, as well as personalised messaging and relevant offers. And of course, the pricing you see when you look for flights. Low score? Prepare yourself to wait to have your call rerouted to a customer service agent. Would you ever tick a box to give consent to this? 
 
F: Fuck no. How is this even legal? What about the GDPR? 
 
It is, in fact, illegal. Adara is based in the US, but they collect data through data warehouses in the Netherlands. They claim they are GDPR-compliant. However, they collect all the data, and then decide on the specific business use, which is definitely not GDPR compliant. 
 
F: exactly! According to GDPR the user has to know in advance what the business use of the data they are giving consent for!!With GDPR and future regulations, there is a way to control how the data is used and with what purpose. Regulations are still blurred or undefined when it comes to metadata. For example, there’s no regulation for the number of records in a database or the timestamp when such record  was created. As a matter of fact data is useless without metadata. 
 
One cannot even collect data without metadata. 
 
Whatsapp, telegram, Facebook messenger... they all create metadata. So one might say “I’ve got end-to-end encryption, buddy”. Sure thing. How about the metadata attached to that encrypted gibberish nobody is really interested in? To show you how unavoidable the concept of metadata is, even Signal developed by the Signal Foundation which is considered the truly end-to-end and open source protocol for confidential information exchange, can see metadata. At Signal they claim they just don’t keep it, as they also state in the Signal’s privacy policy.
 
"Certain information (e.g. a recipient's identifier, an encrypted message body, etc.) is transmitted to us solely for the purpose of placing calls or transmitting messages. Unless otherwise stated below, this information is only kept as long as necessary to place each call or transmit each message, and is not used for any other purpose." This is one of those issues that shall be solved with legislation.
 
But like money laundering, your data is caught in a storm of transactions so intricate that at a certain point, how do you even check...All participating companies share customer data with each other (a process called value exchange). They let marketers utilize the data, for example to target people after they have searched for flights or hotels. Adara creates audience segments and sells them, for example to Google, for advertisement targeting. The consumer data broker LiveRamp for example lists Adara as a data provider. 
 
F: consumer data broker. I am starting to get what you mean when you say that we are for sale. 
 
Let’s talk about LiveRamp, part of Acxiom. 
 
F: there they go... Acxiom... I heard of them 
 
They self-describe as an “Identity Resolution Platform”. 
 
F: I mean, George Orwell would be proud. 
 
Their mission? “To connect offline data and online data back to a single identifier”. In other words, clients can “resolve all” of their “offline and online identifiers back to the individual consumer”. Various digital profiles, like the ones generated on social media or when you visit a website, are matched to databases which contains names, postal addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, geo locations and IP addresses, online and mobile identifiers, such as cookie and device IDs. F: well, all this stuff is possible if and only if someone gets in possession of all these profiles, or well... they purchase them. Still, what the f**k. 
 
A cute example? Imagine you register on any random website but you don’t want to give them your home address. They just buy it from LiveRamp, which gets it from your phone geolocation data - which is for sale. Where does your phone sit still for 12 hours every night? That’s your home address. Easy.
 
F: And they definitely know how much time do I spend at the gym, without even checking my Instagram! Ok this is another level of creepy. 
 
Clients of LiveRamp can upload their own consumer data to the platform, combine it with data from hundreds of 100 third-party data providers, and then utilize it on more than 500 marketing technology platforms. They can use this data to find and target people with specific characteristics, to recognize and track consumers across devices and platforms, to profile and categorize them, to personalize content for them, and to measure how they behave. For example, clients could “recognize a website visitor” and “provide a customized offer” based on extensive profile data, without requiring said user to log in to the website. Furthermore, LiveRamp has a data store, for other companies to “buy and sell valuable customer data”. 
 
F: What is even the point of giving me the choice to consent to anything online?
 
In short, there is no point. 
 
F: it seems we are so behind with regulations on data sharing. GDPR is not cutting it, not really. With programmatic advertising we have created a monster that has really grown out of control. So: our lives are completely transparent to private corporations, that constantly surveil us en-masse, and exploit all of our data to sell us shit. How does this affect our freedom? How about we just don’t buy it? Can it be that simple? And I would not take a no for an answer here.
 
Unfortunately, no. 
 
F:  oh crap!
 
I’m going to read you a passage from Permanent Record:  
 
Who among us can predict the future? Who would dare to? The answer to the first question is no one, really, and the answer to the second is everyone, especially every government and business on the planet. This is what that data of ours is used for. Algorithms analyze it for patterns of established behaviour in order to extrapolate behaviours to come, a type of digital prophecy that’s only slightly more accurate that analog methods like palm reading. Once you go digging into the actual technical mechanisms by which predictability is calculated, you come to understand that its science is, in fact, anti-scientific, and fatally misnamed: predictability is actually manipulation.
 
A website that tells you that because you liked book 1 then you might also like book 2, isn’t offering an educated guess as much as a mechanism of subtle coercion. We can’t allow ourselves to be used in this way, to be used against the future. We can’t permit our data to be used to sell us the very things that must not be sold, such as journalism. [....] We can’t let the god-like surveillance we’re under be used to “calculate” our citizenship scores, or to “predict” our criminal activity; to tell us what kind of education we can have, or what kind of job we can have [...], to discriminate against us based on our financial, legal, and medical histories, not to mention our ethnicity or race, which are constructs that data often assumes or imposes.
 
[...] if we allow [our data] to be used to identify us, then it will be used to victimize us, even to modify us - to remake the very essence of our humanity in the image of the technology that seeks its control. Of course, all of the above has already happened. 
 
F: In other words, we are surveilled and our data collected, and used to affect every aspect of our lives - what we read, what movies we watch, where we travel, what we buy, who we date, what we study, where we work… This is a self-fulfilling prophecy for all of humanity, and the prophet is a stupid, imperfect algorithm optimised just to make money. So I guess my message of today for all Data Scientists out there is this: just… don't. 
 
 
 
References
 
https://github.com/signalapp
 
Wolfie Christl report https://crackedlabs.org/en/corporate-surveillance
 
wolfie.crackedlabs.org