Re: [LAU] Linkedin - Out

From: Paul Davis <paul@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Wed Jun 15 2016 - 20:21:31 EEST

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 8:23 AM, Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@email-addr-hidden>
wrote:

> I am working in the adtech industry and can say as a fact that all data is
> anonymous. Anonymity is very seriously enforced throughout the industry
> and, additionally, lack of such anonymity will be seen very quickly by huge
> amounts of engineers working with user databases.
>

Anonymity isn't enough. It takes very little anonymous data to uniquely
identify a person. Certainly, it isn't trivial to link up the unique
identity to an actual human being, but it is far less difficult than most
people imagine. The reality is that there isn't very much interest in
taking that step in most cases - it is more work than reward for most
people in a position to exploit the data. But if there is some specific
reason why you would want to break the anonymity barrier and connect data
to an actual person, there are now numerous organizations with enough data
to do so. If/when they start to cross-reference each other's data, that
game gets even easier, and the result is something extremely different than
most people imagine when they signed up for various net-enabled stuff.

>
> Which is exactly why I am asking Will what exactly he is afraid of. The
> need to run off of LinkedIn, scrambling information about oneself, because
> Microsoft buys it, shows irrational hatred for Microsoft that is probably
> ideologically charged. And probably hints at all the free software alarmist
> propaganda about how "corporations are controlling you", which is in the
> vast majority of cases is simply misrepresentation of actual state of
> things.
>

It may be a misrepresentation of the actual state of things, but
neverthless remains a highly potent and visceral description of how many
people experience the distribution of power in the world.

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Received on Wed Jun 15 20:15:02 2016

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