On Our Enviable Lives

It is impossible to look at even the most remote and spectacular landscape without the implicit knowledge of a sprawling, highly technological, and extractive global economy.

Technology companies haven’t helped themselves by adopting blasé attitudes on the subject. Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, said in 1999 that, “you have zero privacy, get over it.” Ten years later, Google’s Eric Schmidt opined that, “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

#Dataanalysis yields profile of up to 52 #personalitytraits based on an individual’s #wc in #tweets.

"Can I say that we will never use facial recognition technology for any other purposes? Absolutely not," Egan said. But, she noted, "if we decided to use it in different ways we will continue to provide people transparency about that and we will continue to provide control."

I believe big data is becoming the driving force in our global economy and will drive a new kind of war. Advertisers need it to target consumers. Governments and law enforcement agencies need it to keep us safe and secure, so they say. Internet platforms and technology companies, or the “siren servers” as Jaron Lanier aptly calls them in his latest book, need it to maintain their pivotal roles in our digital lives and to continue nurturing us with all those amazing free services, apps and platforms that we can’t seem to do without any longer.

If you share something publicly on social media, “you should expect the world to read it,” said Andy Sellars, a staff attorney at the Digital Media Law Project. “And you should expect that world to include law enforcement.”