The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, February 02, 2017

It only takes 33 bits of information to identify a single person in the world

Speaking of FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace, this was quoted in one of the comments on Flutterby:

The surest way to discourage conversations is to enable likes/favorites and retweets/reblogs. These inarticulate gestures barely qualify as social. They are literally the least amount of social interaction you can have with someone. Press a button, done. Much social, wow. They are the form letters of social networks. No personal response is required. To whom it may concern: click. I would've traded one hundred likes for one person taking the small amount of time and effort to personally reply with "I like your tweet." When my tweets got likes but no replies, it was still a very empty experience for me. It still felt like I was tweeting into the void.

What's Wrong With Twitter

While “likes” might be socially meaningless, they might also be quite dangerous as highlighted here:

Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook "likes" by a user, it was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn't stop there. Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce whether someone's parents were divorced.

The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict a subject's answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly: before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook "likes." Seventy "likes" were enough to outdo what a person's friends knew, 150 what their parents knew, and 300 "likes" what their partner knew. More "likes" could even surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves.

Via Hacker News, The Data That Turned the World Upside Down

Oh, and those online quizes that often show up on FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace? Yeah, they work just like “likes” in pinning you down (as described in the “World Upside Down” article).

I'm just saying …

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name, symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.

Copyright © 1999-2024 by Sean Conner. All Rights Reserved.