Re:Carnegie Mellon face recognition study has unsettling res...
by dspillett on Thursday September 29, 2011 @06:28AM
(#3051869)
> which is entirely reasonable, yet he gets lambasted in the press as being "creepy" [2] based on a sensationalist snippet.
The creepiness factor in his comment, and in the way advertisers and those selling us to advertisers operate, isn't really about the information being out there. It is about being followed by an entity you don't know and have no particular reason to trust.
We don't like being followed like that, there is something in us that takes it as a threat. It is something we share with most animals and is a sensible reaction that evolved by making animals with that reaction less susceptible to certain threats (in the wild, being followed usually means you are a target for something you are not going to like, probably involving claws and teeth). Even in modern life it can be a useful reaction - if someone follows you down an alley you get ready to take action just in case that person turning down the alley after you isn't a perfectly innocent coincidence.
Being followed by Facebook/Google/any-one-else-on-the-planet-who-wants-to-sell-info-about-my-life is not the same as the physical risk that being followed in RealLife(tm) could imply, but our brains are not wired to see the difference. Anyway, people knowing more about you that you know about them can be a threat in some circumstances, or at least could put you at a disadvantage.
A secondary issue is that people sometimes want/need to hide things because other people's reactions could have unreasonable negative repercussions. If you were a gay man in a place where being so could get you strung up for what local laws (or local vigilantes) consider to be moral deviancy, "just stop being gay then you'll have nothing to hide" simply isn't an option and you wouldn't want the information "leaking" out by virtue of services giving you personalised adverts relevant to it while using facebook (or any other ad funded service) in public. That may be stretching the point a little far, but there are reasons to want to keep things about yourself to yourself (without wanting to completely disconnect that part of yourself from your private online activities) other than it being illegal, which if I remember rightly was what Eric Schmidt was talking about when he said that oft-quoted-out-of-context phrase, and sometimes something being illegal doesn't make it wrong (morality being a lot more subjective than peopel like to think - what is wrong to me might be fine to you).
The creepiness factor in his comment, and in the way advertisers and those selling us to advertisers operate, isn't really about the information being out there. It is about being followed by an entity you don't know and have no particular reason to trust.
We don't like being followed like that, there is something in us that takes it as a threat. It is something we share with most animals and is a sensible reaction that evolved by making animals with that reaction less susceptible to certain threats (in the wild, being followed usually means you are a target for something you are not going to like, probably involving claws and teeth). Even in modern life it can be a useful reaction - if someone follows you down an alley you get ready to take action just in case that person turning down the alley after you isn't a perfectly innocent coincidence.
Being followed by Facebook/Google/any-one-else-on-the-planet-who-wants-to-sell-info-about-my-life is not the same as the physical risk that being followed in RealLife(tm) could imply, but our brains are not wired to see the difference. Anyway, people knowing more about you that you know about them can be a threat in some circumstances, or at least could put you at a disadvantage.
A secondary issue is that people sometimes want/need to hide things because other people's reactions could have unreasonable negative repercussions. If you were a gay man in a place where being so could get you strung up for what local laws (or local vigilantes) consider to be moral deviancy, "just stop being gay then you'll have nothing to hide" simply isn't an option and you wouldn't want the information "leaking" out by virtue of services giving you personalised adverts relevant to it while using facebook (or any other ad funded service) in public. That may be stretching the point a little far, but there are reasons to want to keep things about yourself to yourself (without wanting to completely disconnect that part of yourself from your private online activities) other than it being illegal, which if I remember rightly was what Eric Schmidt was talking about when he said that oft-quoted-out-of-context phrase, and sometimes something being illegal doesn't make it wrong (morality being a lot more subjective than peopel like to think - what is wrong to me might be fine to you).