Wall of text, I know, but I had trouble sleeping so… Yeah… Here goes;

Knowledge is power.

Here in Sweden there’s a service that has been pouring money on marketing the last two years. The service is called House ID and they let you store all important documents about your house for free… Free… Free?

So what will they make money on?

Well, let’s jump 10 years into the future and just imagine the possibilities.

Criminals can easily check what house owners have upgraded their locks or purchased home alarm systems. They could even purchase data about all the houses in an area that has a specific lock type with a known flaw.

Your phone is, with all its sensors, a fantastic surveillance device and people happily take it with them wherever they go.

In the 90’s, when I worked for IBM, the buzzword was “Data mining”. Ordinary people never understood what it was and I was often asked about it. Extremely simplified: look at the data you have and try to read between the lines to generate data that you originally didn’t have.

The biggest chain of convenient stores in Sweden launched banking services and a pay card around this time. If you used the card for grocery shopping you’d get a monthly bonus and great offers and discounts. So I gave an innocent example of what your purchase data could be used for. They could see that a woman purchased pads on fairly the same time each month or quarter. Now, when cross checking this with purchase history from other women they could see that a lot of those women also purchased chocolate at the same time they purchase pads. Something something with a lot of women getting cravings of chocolate around the same time each month. Yes, it’s a generalization but still a real life example in this case. So they sent out coupons for chocolate, matching the time around when the customer normally purchased pads, and what do you know? The sale of chocolate increased. Significantly.

Now, pads isn’t a very sensitive subject of you’re older than 15… But think what data Tinder registers. They can’t know for sure if you’re liberal, conservative or even a communist… or can they? By looking at your behavior in their app, what you did, where (Tinder uses GPS, remember?) you did it and when you did it, they can draw conclusions about a lot of things that you never intended to share with them.

Today there are sensors placed strategically in shopping malls that registers what store windows you stopped to look at. They actually know, with a pretty high certainty, exactly what product in the window that caught your attention. How they can be so accurate you say? Because you have Bluetooth activated and the mall app installed. They just triangulate your exact position.

All of this is data about you that is correct. You did all of that and it was registered.

But what if corrupted data was registered? What if that data was the basis for you getting a loan for your dream house? How do you correct a conclusion that is obviously wrong when the bank just tells you that what data they purchase, from who and how they process it is a business secret and they refuse to share any details.

Now, all sorts of data has always been collected but in the old time it was stored on paper and cross comparison/compiling data was an expensive and tedious task. Today it is not. Today your phone could store and process data that would take months to process in the old times.

That slowness/inertia acted as a law of nature, protecting us and our life from being mapped.

It’s not just that data is collected or what data is collected… It’s what it might be used for that should bother you. Not only what is used for today but also what it could be used for tomorrow.