Re:Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data
by mumblemumble on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @10:30AM
(#24271689)
We can step outside of government examples, too, and find cases where corporations getting all data sciencey with this information have accomplished some pretty ucky - and also impossible to anticipate - things.
An instructive case here is Target figuring out that they could use customer purchase history to detect, with a pretty decent degree of confidence, when a customer was pregnant. They then proceeded to use this model to send out mailings, and those mailings resulted in people being outed in rather compromising and potentially seriously harmful ways.
Re:Kindle collects a surprisingly large amount of data
by Cyphase on Tuesday August 25, 2020 @06:33PM
(#24277043)
Here's the Target story from 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....
Understanding how the book reader features are used in practice is good. Selling the same data to a advertiser is bad. Profiling people into predefined groups is bad, and the technology has risk of having false positives/negatives that reinforce stereotypes. The law has yet to catch up to treat information gathered by libraries and information gathered by a developer of e-readers as being very similar in risks.