Facebook tracks status updates that people start and then delete, so as to better understand why they decide not to post.
.. The few big media outlets that dare run reports about corruption have been slapped with huge tax bills on the order of billions of dollars, which were then miraculously rescinded after coverage was blunted.
.. How might they do it in practice? Consider that some people are prone to voting conservative when confronted with fearful scenarios. If your psychological profile puts you in that group, a campaign could send you a message that ignites your fears in just the right way. And for your neighbor who gets mad at scaremongering? To her, they’ll present a commitment to a minor policy that the campaign knows she’s interested in—and make it sound like it’s a major commitment. It’s all individualized. It’s all opaque. You don’t see what she sees, and she doesn’t see what you see.
.. Most of the demonstrators around me were wearing yellow construction hats, sold to them by Turkey’s mostly Roma street peddlers. (From day one, the peddlers also offered spray paint, goggles, and other protesting essentials. Does anyone else in the world have better just-in-time stock management than dirt-poor street peddlers?)
.. When the ammunition from another crowd-control weapon—water cannons—began to burn on contact, the protesters sent samples to a lab, which discovered that the government had added pepper spray to the water. Months later, a government spokesperson acknowledged this.)
.. Every citizen is now assigned a national ID number, which provides access to a government website documenting almost every interaction with the state, from property records to taxes. For many, it’s a relief to have escaped the country’s old bureaucratic systems. But the databases also enable massive surveillance. Citizens of Turkey need an ID number to buy a phone SIM card, for example, or to make a doctor’s appointment through the public health system.
.. Big-data surveillance is dangerous exactly because it provides solutions to these problems. Individually tailored, subtle messages are less likely to produce a cynical reaction.
.. Last year, an article in Adweek noted that women feel less attractive on Mondays, and that this might be the best time to advertise make-up to them. “Women also listed feeling lonely, fat and depressed as sources of beauty vulnerability,” the article added. So why stop with Mondays? Big data analytics can identify exactly which women feel lonely or fat or depressed. Why not focus on them? And why stop at using known “beauty vulnerabilities”?
Spying by N.S.A. Ally Entangled U.S. Law Firm
In justifying the agency’s sweeping powers, the Obama administration often emphasizes the N.S.A.’s role in fighting terrorism and cyberattacks, but disclosures in recent months from the documents leaked by Mr. Snowden show the agency routinely spies on trade negotiations, communications of economic officials in other countries and even foreign corporations.
American intelligence officials do not deny that they collect economic information from overseas, but argue that they do not engage in industrial espionage by sharing that information with American businesses. China, for example, is often accused of stealing business secrets from Western corporations and passing them to Chinese corporations.
.. The Australians have obtained nearly 1.8 million encrypted master keys, which are used to protect private communications, from the Telkomsel mobile telephone network in Indonesia, and developed a way to decrypt almost all of them, according to a 2013 N.S.A. document.
Google Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself ..
The reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself.
.. “Google Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself, and gives Google that common understanding of who you are,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management for Google Plus.
How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined
The Obama campaign’s tactics illuminate something that is often missed in our discussions of data-mining and marketing—the fact that governments and politicians are major clients of marketing agencies and data brokers.
.. The first is data discrimination. Once customers are sliced and diced into segmented demographic categories, they can be sorted. An Acxiom presentation to the Consumer Marketing Organization in 2013 placed customers into “customer value segments” and noted that while the top 30 percent of customers add 500 percent of value, the bottom 20 percent actually cost 400 percent of value. In other words, it behooves companies to shower their top customers with attention, while ignoring the bottom 20 percent, who may spend “too much” time on customer service calls, and may cost companies in returns or coupons, or otherwise cost more than they provide.
These “low-value targets” are known in industry parlance as “waste.” Joseph Turow, a University of Pennsylvania professor in communications who studies niche marketing, asks what happens to those people who fall into the categories of “waste,” entirely without their knowledge or any notification.