[LINK] "On the Leakiness of Surveillance Culture, the Corporate Gaze, and What That Has To Do ..."

[rfmcdonald]

Quiet Babylon's Tim Maly, after a long pause, has made another smart post about the panopticon. Too often, the assumption is made that the algorithms used to track my actions on the web and determine my innermost desires are accurate--I know I've made it. But what, Maly suggests, will come of the panopticon if it keeps getting things wrong?

The truth is illustrated by an infographic halfway through Wired’s scathing overview of Klout. It shows that Klout ranks Robert Scoble as more influential than RZA, Sarah Palin, and Craig Venter. (You can learn a lot about the blinkered nature of Klout by the fact that their official account proudly linked to the piece.)

Any sane marketing organization would look at these results and conclude that Klout’s metrics are utterly flawed. Instead, we learn that some companies are offering perks to people with high Klout scores in the hopes that they’ll spread the word about their VIP treatment. In turn, we learn about people (including the reporter) who find themselves altering their behaviour in the hopes of finding favour with this blind, demented judge.

[. . .]

I’m coming around to Eben Moglen’s view that social networking, as currently designed, is an ecological disaster for the social environment. This isn’t, like, a new insight or anything. We are the product and all that. But sometimes it takes a turn of phrase to drive a point home. Here’s the line that tipped me over the edge: “Every time you tag anything or respond to anything or link to anything, you’re informing on your friends.”

More to the point, you are informing on your friends so that a cadre of socially clueless dudes can get rich selling the output of broken algorithms to marketers, in the form of human lives sliced up in such a way as to make it easier to run database queries.

This is a situation that’s profoundly broken. It’s basically an open secret that it’s broken ethically, but it’s also broken emperically. To understand how broken, consider Alexis Madrigal’s attempt to work out how much user data is worth. The answer he comes up with is plus-or-minus 7 orders of magnitude. Half-a-penny or $1,200. You know. Depending.