Data and Goliath Read Online Free PDF Page A

old lovers we still think about,
     our shames, our concerns, and our secrets. If Google decided to, it could figure out
     which of us is worried about our mental health, thinking about tax evasion, or planning
     to protest a particular government policy. I used to say that Google knows more about
     what I’m thinking of than my wife does. But that doesn’t go far enough. Google knows
     more about what I’m thinking of than I do , because Google remembers all of it perfectly and forever.
    I did a quick experiment with Google’s autocomplete feature. This is the feature that
     offers to finish typing your search queries in real time, based on what other people
     have typed. When I typed “should I tell my w,” Google suggested “should i tell my
     wife i had an affair” and “should i tell my work about dui” as the most popular completions.
     Google knows who clicked on those completions, and everything else they ever searched
     on.
    Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt admitted as much in 2010: “We know where you are. We know
     where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
    If you have a Gmail account, you can check for yourself. You can look at your search
     history for any time you were logged in. It goes back for as long as you’ve had the
     account, probably for years. Do it; you’ll be surprised.It’s more intimate than if you’d sent Google your diary. And even though Google lets
     you modify your ad preferences, you have no rights to delete anything you don’t want
     there.
    There are other sources of intimate data and metadata. Records of your purchasing
     habits reveal a lot about who you are. Your tweets tell the world what time you wake
     up in the morning, and what time you go to bed each night. Your buddy lists and address
     books reveal your political affiliation and sexual orientation. Your e-mail headers
     reveal who is central to your professional, social, and romantic life.
    One way to think about it is that data is content, and metadata is context. Metadata
     can be much more revealing than data, especially when collected in the aggregate.
     When you have one person under surveillance, the contents of conversations, text messages,
     and e-mails can be more important than the metadata. But when you have an entire population
     under surveillance, the metadata is far more meaningful, important, and useful.
    As former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything
     about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”
     In 2014, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden remarked, “We kill people based
     on metadata.”
    The truth is, though, that the difference is largely illusory. It’s all data about
     us.
    CHEAPER SURVEILLANCE
    Historically, surveillance was difficult and expensive. We did it only when it was
     important: when the police needed to tail a suspect, or a business required a detailed
     purchasing history for billing purposes. There were exceptions, and they were extreme
     and expensive. The exceptionally paranoid East German government had 102,000 Stasi
     surveilling a population of 17 million: that’s one spy for every 166 citizens, or
     one for every 66 if you include civilian informants.
    Corporate surveillance has grown from collecting as little data as necessary to collecting
     as much as possible. Corporations always collected information on their customers,
     but in the past they didn’t collect very much of it and held it only as long as necessary.
     Credit card companiescollected only the information about their customers’ transactions that they needed
     for billing. Stores hardly ever collected information about their customers, and mail-order
     companies only collected names and addresses, and maybe some purchasing history so
     they knew when to remove someone from their mailing list. Even Google, back in the
     beginning, collected far less information about its