I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself

Re:I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself by slashcom on Thursday June 13, 2013 @10:40AM (#5874259)

Another problem is he doesn't include any sort of meaningful baseline. Maybe 67% of the people he talks to are male. In which case, he's not predicting anything. Just guessing randomly biased by his own calling habits.

[EDIT: I had some other criticisms that were incorrect and overly harsh anyway. I've removed them.]

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Re:I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself by gabestein on Thursday June 13, 2013 @10:55AM (#5874355)

Thanks for the feedback. As I'm fairly new to all of this, I'd love to hear how I can turn this into a more viable experiment.

Also, to defend myself a little: I think I'm at least being responsible by in no way claiming that it's statistically valid, and in fact making the point that it's not, and citing the reasons why, several times in the article.

I do stand by my point, however, that this helps the public understand the danger of metadata for data-mining, as well as introducing them to the pitfalls of statistics.

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Re:I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself by quchen on Thursday June 13, 2013 @11:05AM (#5874408)

> As I'm fairly new to all of this, I'd love to hear how I can turn this into a more viable experiment.

The most important thing is getting an estimate of how good your averages are. Try to modify a couple of things, for example how do the 67% change with sample size (verification)? How does the number turn out if you feed it biased data, e.g. only male phone numbers (falsification)?

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Re:I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself by gabestein on Thursday June 13, 2013 @11:10AM (#5874441)

Thanks. I solemnly swear to not abuse statistics, so I'll play around and update the piece.

The goal is to use this as a hook to get the public interested, then take them for the ride as I learn. That's why I tried to be really cautious about pointing out all the reasons why this particular model is bad.

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Re:I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself by quchen on Thursday June 13, 2013 @02:55PM (#5875889)

I didn't mean to say you specifically were abusing statistics, it's just very easy to draw dubious conclusions. (Doing this intentionally would be the abuse I was talking about.)

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Re:I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself by gabestein on Thursday June 13, 2013 @03:44PM (#5876125)

I know, but I still want to take it seriously, and thank you for your criticism.

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Re:I'm Beating The NSA To The Punch By Spying On Myself by gabestein on Thursday June 13, 2013 @05:54PM (#5876840)

Thanks to your help, I found a huge, obvious problem that was keeping the accuracy low and remarkable stable no matter what size of training data I tried. Here's the update: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3012908/tracking/im-beating-the-ns...

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