I suppose I shouldn’t be at all surprised about what I read
on Facebook, given the measures being currently rolled out to combat “fake news”
articles, but what surprised me more was an advertisement that appeared in the
middle of the long procession of updates from family members and work
colleagues. Somehow, Facebook’s data and algorithms suggested I read an
article, first published by “The New York Times” in October 2016, titled “Is It
OK to Find Sexual Satisfaction Outside Your Marriage?” The article turned out
to be the from the newspaper’s problem page, which also answered a query about
smoking after beginning a new health insurance policy.
I certainly didn’t need to read it – it’s not a case of, “she
doth protest too much,” I’m just not married, and I don’t smoke – but it made
me wonder what it was about me, or my associates, that made Facebook suggest
this to me. An algorithm is not “artificial intelligence,” in which case it
would have known better, but all it had to go on is the information we had all
been feeding into it.
Later the same day, my thumb clicked on the wrong “Maps” app
on my phone, clicking on the app provided with the phone, and not the better
one I usually use. Somehow, without me never having asked it, the app had
plotted my usual journey to and from work, even down to marking the two ends of
the line as, “Work” and “Home.”
We had this coming. Tesco Clubcard, the supermarket loyalty
card launched nationwide in 1995, may be the first time most people had come
across the idea of “Big Data,” where the data being collected was so large, so
complex, that the ways of storing and reading through it had to change. The
results, however, caused Lord McLaurin, a Tesco executive, to declare, “What
scares me about this is that you know more about my customers after three
months than I know after 30 years.”
We rely on “Big Data” to anticipate our needs, demands, and
wishes. What that means, however, is that companies can no longer be in a
position to guess what people might need. Tesco has expanded enormously over
the twenty years since Clubcard began because it knows exactly what it needs to
buy – it is a business that no longer needs to anticipate demand, in the same
manner as Facebook, Google, Apple, and so on.
However, in the rush to accept the more convenient future that
Big Data can bring, we often rush past the Terms & Conditions to press the “Accept”
button, something I am also guilty of doing, in the name of convenience. Would
we be less accepting to give away our information if we took the time to read
through the T&Cs? R. Sikoryak has created “Terms and Conditions: The
Graphic Novel,” a 94-page comic adaptation of the Apple iTunes Terms and
Conditions but, with this being unauthorised, is it against Apple’s business
plans to make their conditions more entertaining to read? Does it no longer
matter? I have a good idea for Netflix’s next big show.
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