BusinessWeek journalist and author Stephen Baker‘s book “The Numerati” gives us a truly fascinating, yet scary, view of those working to know every little detail about us. I had the good fortune to be able to listen him present his book last night.
It’s his first book, and his original proposal was to look at how math is taught and used around the world. His editor called him up and told him, “You know, your entire book is actually in your proposed chapter 4 – mathematical modeling of people.” It’s still early on in how these computer scientists and statisticians are modeling us, but clearly they will make progress.
The thing that caught my ear related to the themes of this blog was when Mr. Baker described the most frequent question he gets asked – something along the lines of “aren’t you scared that the Numerati will destroy our privacy?” Certainly, this is the kind of fear that immediately hits us when we hear things like IBM creating mathematical models of every consultant in their employ using every conceivable numeric figure that can be measured for each of them, or of Google knowing our every keystroke and movement on the web (and now our phones).
Yet, Mr. Baker pointed out something that strikes to the heart of not seeing the forest for the trees. It appears that many of us are concerned about protecting our privacy in theory. However, when offered the opportunity to save money at the grocery store if we let them have some of our information, many of us acquiesce . When offered the opportunity to fly by the toll both using a magnetic identifier versus having to wait to drop change in the booth, many of choose the convenience. I would add, when surfing the web, if one doesn’t use a javascript blocker, many sites use Google analytics and feed some information from you to Google that includes other sites you’ve visited.
Reminds me of Ben Franklin’s quote about (paraphrasing here) those willing to give up a little bit of freedom for greater security deserve neither freedom nor security. Food for thought, anyway: if we care about our privacy so much, we should be careful what information we choose to share with whom and when – especially if it’s for a minor rather than major convenience. (Oh, and he also touched upon Social Media and how younger folks are sharing so many details about their lives. Guess we’ll see how that either comes back to bite them or possibly further erodes privacy concerns in our society in the future. On that note… have I mentioned you can follow me on Twitter?)
Original content by Ricardo G. (aka @ggroovin)
Another thought-provoking post. Social media is changing the way we’re interacting for the better, but it also does expose us. Most of us aren’t very careful. By the way, anyone can contact me at 512-445-1796 or rquigley@statesman.com.