This is what comes out of Google allowing apps to read phone IMEI in Android. I have no concrete proof, but the reason why all major Chinese apps snoop after phone IMEI is said to be that the commies have secretly demanded Chinese dotcoms to collect and report phone IMEIs.
For example if you have a 6.0 or later Android, Alibaba app will block you if you disabled the permission to read IMEI or it detects spoofing.
It is easy to see how they also use it for their own purposes: open a new taobao account, search for some items, do factory reset, install taobao and see that you are being shown same stuff you been searching before. This way they also clearly violate Google store rules that prohibit using IMEIs as tracking IDs for marketing purposes. It was reported over so many times, and Google clearly knows of this. I guess, they are afraid of antagonising "the premier Chinese dotcom" or still considering going back to China.
> Google allowing apps to read
> phone IMEI in Android
An unpopular sentiment, but this is why I love iOS. I genuinely don't think any of my apps can meaningfully spy on me without my having told them they may. I even get reminders if I've let an app read my location in the background, to check that's what I want to do.
On Android 6.0+ you can deny the READ_PHONE_STATE permission and stop using apps that won't work if you do. A quick search seems to indicate that there is an Alibaba app for iOS. Do you think Apple negotiated that the IMEI isn't required for the iOS version?
Personally I don't trust Android (or the hardware companies that sell Android devices) or iOS but picked an Android 6+ device because in principle I'd rather have an operating system that's more open. AFAIK all the Apple privacy stories have been about US cases so as a non-US person I'm also not sure they'd apply the same standards to me.
I'm on 7.1.1 and I don't feel like installing the Alibaba app to try this out but when you say it requires the permission to read IMEI is this under the phone permission setting that says "read phone status and identity" or something else?
Many people might not know, in US, credit card transactions/payments are on sale by various sources. There's a very active market for this and some fintech startups are solely based on this kind of data. Since most of our financial life is based on credit card, we are under surveillance at a micro level in a similar situation.
The issue is we not only use 'services', we handle data to the service providers. Data under their custody is usually stored and transferred with less secure protection, like on a thumbdrive or sent by email attachments. I don't see this situation will get any better soon.
The thing in China is that so many trivial daily activities require government-issued ID. Buying a coach/train ticket. Buying a SIM card. Every website/mobile app registration require a mobile phone number, which means any account is easily traceable to your government-issued ID, too.
Hell, even visiting your friend in a hotel requires recording your ID before hotel staff will let you go upstairs (strictly enforced in cheap hotels). Internet cafes' administration system had been linked up to government ID systems more than a decade ago.
This is the Polizeistaat that Hitler could only dream of. It's a whole other level over any credit card surveillance.
I've found it interesting that in the press recently, you will usually find some discussion about privacy concerns regarding companies like Facebook/Google, but I very rarely see any mention of the privacy implications of credit card companies and credit bureaus selling customer data.
I'm admittedly not well informed on the subject but I assume this has been going on for decades, are there any consumer privacy laws around this? While I find Google data collection activities worrisome, I at least have some faith in their technical ability to keep that data safe. And unless I'm mistaken Google only sells targeted access but not the actual data which is what the credit card companies and bureaus do.
Typically, this data is not sold attached to an individual, but in aggregate and annonymized to help determine spending patterns, habits, etc.
There is a significant difference between this and extensive government data with your name attached, though I agree it's not great from a privacy perspective.
Typically (as has been said) you can opt out of this sharing.
Indeed, and the effects of this are visible everywhere. In the advertising systems of Google and Facebook, for example, you can target individuals according to their buying patterns - whether they've recently bought furniture, trips overseas, etc. The source of that data is information from credit card transactions.
This is true. AMEX tried to sell me access to that data. That said, I'm not sure if it goes down to name/card number or if it's aggregate - we never bought it.
So on my statement, you see a random number of transactions for random amount, all from Amazon. I would rarely call it "surveillance at micro level" when you don't even know what I've bought.
Those who have educated themselves about the Snowden leaks know that countries such as the US and the UK do by no means lag behind China, as far as mass surveillance is concerned.
are the transactions sold with the personal information? xyz bought these things this month. Seems hard to believe, although I'm sure they may do this after anonymizing the user's personal information.
> Now every picture posted, every comment made, every driving infraction could go into a central database to produce a person's 'trustworthiness' score.
How is this China-only ? Can't Facebook do the same ? Can't the government force Facebook, Microsoft, etc to give out all the information that we generate in their networks ?
Can't they compute such a "trustworthiness" score and sell it to your (potential) employer ?
Of course they can and they will if they don't already.
I've agreed to countless "license agreements" which I haven't read - I might have given some company my exclusive permission to monitor my every move...
What if your agreement contained a special clause not present in other user's agreements ?
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is going on in China will become the status quo in a lot of other countries and this will accelerate as shit gets tougher due to all the global problems that we now face.
What's even more disappointing is that these surveillance systems are most probably built on top of open source software and libraries - which have been ideologically released in order to increase the user's 'freedom', yet who would have thought ...
Unfortunately the dream of a better, closer, freer world is now passing through a nightmare phase - we've built the perfect tools for crazies to do their crazy thing...
Agreed. There's a technical word for the kind of world we technical folks are helping to build. It's called a "dystopia"
And while it's fun to either wave our arms around and say "But everybody's doing it!" or talking about wild dreams of a better tomorrow, the crap we've created is right here, right now. As a technical person, if you're looking for somebody to blame, there's the mirror.
When I was in the armed forces and you needed something desperately that you did not have, somebody would always say "Well, you'd better grow one"
We technical folks do not have the moral underpinning we need to help there be a brighter tomorrow. We're lacking the social and political theory and the historical grounding to understand what kinds of things might help and what kinds of things might hurt. Instead we just imagine how what we're making might help mankind along. News flash: imagining isn't cutting it any more.
We may not have the tools we need to responsibly create the tech we're creating, but we'd better grow some.
1. Secrets that are widely known don't stay secret for long. Snowden leaked a lot of documents and none of them said the government was doing this already.
2. The data that is out there is _very_ messy. If you have a unique name and you use it as your twitter handle, sure, this is already happening. It's called Klout. But most companies just use it to figure out what image to put on their coupons.
3. I've never heard of employers asking for someones "trustwrothiness score". We as a society get pretty pissy about this type of thing. We've banned IQ tests, and needlessly asking for credit reports / scores. If a metric like this came out in wide use we'd ban it.
4. License agreements are generally unenforcible. You don't get the right to someones car just because you put it in a license agreement. If you could do that there would be lots of scams trying to get old grandpa to install a new photo app to see his grandkids.
5. What is going on in China is overblown in the media. It's not a episode of Black Mirror. The people that are most impacted by it are politically loud young adults online, but the vast, vast majority of Chinese don't worry about it. There are much more important human rights concerns in China that need addressing like freedom of the press.
6. We're not in a nightmare phase, we're in the same phase we've always been in. The telegraph cables were tapped by every major government, the radios listened to, the phones tapped, we even put recording equipment into televisions we sold overseas, our major hotels have always been tapped (or easily tapped given a court order if a foreign national was in town). This has been happening for over a hundred years.
I agree we should know about it (thank you Snowden) and in some cases I don't like it, but the solution isn't to wish it away, it's to use encryption and not say or do stupid things around computers.
In the EU you can instruct a company to divulge everything it knows about you. Facebook will give it to you on a DVD (or at least they used to).
As an instrument of control and coercion, however, there is a massive difference between a government collecting data and not telling you, and a government collecting the data and telling you they use it to calculate your worth to society. The latter seems utterly tyrannical.
- China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction. Chinese policy since Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence poverty. Free markets were a big part of this, but so were Special Economic Zones starting with Shenzhen, a culture of sharing IP, massive govt investments in infrastructure, research and education.
- China are also the most successful urbanists today. Many of those 100s of millions of former rural poor are in cities now. In the time it took California to debate building a single High Speed Rail line from SF to LA, China connected their whole country with trains that are much faster, much more useful (because they go directly into urban centers and connect to fast local transit), and much cheaper. Ours still isn't done.
--
And yet, at the same time, China also seems to be prototyping some kind of grim meathook future.
- Extremely aggressive surveillance. Near zero respect for privacy. Govt deputizing the tech sector to spy and censor on their behalf.
- "Social Credit" Scores based on surveillance, which look like a frighteningly powerful way to neuter dissent
China moves faster than we do, both for better and for worse. I guess our challenge is to emulate the things they're doing right (eg the vastly more efficient and effective way they build transit), while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach.
> China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction
This is only true if you're applying a ludicrous double standard. China has done better than most other countries at this because China was extremely poor just a few decades back. Nowadays, much of China is still very poor. Of course it's much easier for China to slash its poverty rates than for an already-developed nation. The real thing to ask about is how long it will take China to bring a western middle-class style quality of life to its citizens.
Sorry, but judging by how things are going in western nations, especially in the USA, we're more likely to emulate their "mistakes and authoritarian overreach" before we even break ground on that rail from SF to LA.
China is very interested in appearing successful. My impression is that they focus on this appearance (building large public projects, making internationally-tracked numbers go up) more than on the human costs involved.
I wish at the very least that our tech companies would stop abetting these crimes against humanity. We should be trying to liberate these people, not use tech to forever enslave them. It's sick.
> while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach
But you can't so easily dissentangle the one from the other. A lot of their development is so quick because they ride roughshod over property rights, safety standards, environmental concerns and individual liberties to push them through.
Oracle maintains a database of personal information for billions of people.
The US corporate surveillance web is rich in complexity.
Before we judge China, lets make sure we know what we're comparing them to.
I highly encourage anyone interested in the subject to watch this talk from last month's Chaos Computer Club Congress.
"Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy:
How thousands of companies are profiling, categorizing, rating and affecting the lives of billions"
You say the Chinese system is sinister because they force you to use ID cards. In the US corporate surveillance system, they can track you without ID cards.
The concerns about US/Western surveillance is that it could lead to routine direct abuses and active intrusions into daily life. It's important that we use the political and legal protections we have to limit the risks this raises.
In China they have routine direct abuses and intrusion into daily life right now and are expanding it as fast as they can. There are no legal protections and the risks are already happening.
If you can't see there's a difference there, I can't help you.
I would say that forcing someone to use an universal ID provides a way stronger and more reliable form of tracking, than a wibbly wobbly system which needs thousands of marketing companies which maybe fulfill their corporate promises and maybe not.
Yup. Here's the thing too. When people troll online, they think hiding behind an alias is enough. You can still be traced back. I am sure the government keep tabs of all your history, even if you are not a person of interest at the moment.
What a silly article: "download the controls to the private sector" indeed. The government already owns the telcos, half the banks, the only domestic interbank transfer system and the only domestic travel reservation system so they have your IMEI, real time location and history, network traffic, bank balance and payment and employment history and travel plans anyway. And that of your friends/relatives. They certainly don't need help from an app. That said, after 16 years in and out of China, I still feel safer here than the US.
What a silly comment, complete with the mandatory "it's worse in the US" passage that mysteriously appears in half of the comments to China-related articles on HN.
Yes, the governments owns telcos etc. Yes, they probably have files on people they consider a threat, such as human rights activists. But to think that all that data is accessible in some kind of coherent manner is ridiculous. This is China, where banks cannot even access information between physical branches of the same bank because of its bizarrely inefficient IT infrastructure. The telcos have been trying to enforce the "real-name" policy for SIM cards for months, yet you can still easily buy and use a SIM card on the street.
They definitely need help from an app, because private Chinese tech companies are somewhat competent compared to the government IT sector.
Do you really feel safer in a country where you can get jailed without trial, where you can jailed, deported and banned from re-entry based on a urine test at the whim of some provincial government official that you crossed paths with? In China, the biggest threat is the government.
This our terrifying future in America - the incoming administration has very scant regard for civil liberties, and is filled with business insiders who worship money above all else.
Add to this the fact that both legislative chambers are controlled by the same party who is "tough" on crime.
For profit or to ostensibly address Terrorism expect surveillance to get much worse.
It is precisely the same in the United States, it is just somewhat deniable there due to things like the FISA court.
It allows peoples' inherent belief in American virtue to doublethink themselves into believing that the NSA doesn't collect this high-res data in bulk from Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and the mobile carriers—when we have clear documents showing that they do.
LOVEINT is real. The large social networks and communications providers are an official arm of the surveillance state, with all of the unfettered access to high resolution data that entails.
Your doctor or hospital hosts data in AWS? Pretty sure HIPAA doesn't count in this case when they're just sucking up all of the traffic in bulk.
Your social media and financial data are already being aggregated and sold—we know this, too.
Pretty terrifying. I'd love to see a more detailed analysis of the datasets they received. It sounds like both governmental and private surveillance systems in China may be pretty leaky.
I wonder if the information is leaked through hacks or compromised individuals.
The big difference is China is openly undemocratic and the citizens know what they are up against. Here its posturing, misdirection, propaganda, nebulous lists, secret process and the exact same thing only under cover and pretense all working like clockwork to lull the citizens into complacency.
Dial back 10-15 years and try to imagine the response to a news item like this. Hysteria about totalitarianism from the media, endless interviews with academics, ngo and human rights organizations. Grandstanding by politicians and citizens. Where are all these noisy vocal folks? What is orchestrated and what is real?
Even though this article is about data on Chinese citizens, I kinda wonder if the Chinese government doesn't keep a big database of what American folks are doing, too.
I mean, why not?
They've the got the hackers. They've got the big DB. They've got the absence of laws preventing such a practice.
I was really surprised to see my Chinese friend pay the restaurant bill using WeChat, just by flashing a QR code. Which means they know all the data a typical social network can handle, but also how much you are paying where.
As if this system didn't exist within the US. Credit and bank account spending records have long been a treasure trove of analytics on how people go about their day to day. Social media extends on this even further since there are many people who post EVERYTHING about them on these platforms.
If people are being tracked by the IMEI number, can't you patch android to just return a random IMEI number unique for every day or hour? The parts of the phone that actually use that number have it hardcoded in, the rest is just for display.
The big problem is black market for data/identities. Not only in China but in the world. Identity theft is quite huge. And a lot of those data weren't even stolen but was sold by those corrupt officials or staffs in some firms.
[+] [-] baybal2|9 years ago|reply
For example if you have a 6.0 or later Android, Alibaba app will block you if you disabled the permission to read IMEI or it detects spoofing.
https://postimg.org/image/m5u0nmdxd/
It is easy to see how they also use it for their own purposes: open a new taobao account, search for some items, do factory reset, install taobao and see that you are being shown same stuff you been searching before. This way they also clearly violate Google store rules that prohibit using IMEIs as tracking IDs for marketing purposes. It was reported over so many times, and Google clearly knows of this. I guess, they are afraid of antagonising "the premier Chinese dotcom" or still considering going back to China.
[+] [-] peteretep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|9 years ago|reply
Personally I don't trust Android (or the hardware companies that sell Android devices) or iOS but picked an Android 6+ device because in principle I'd rather have an operating system that's more open. AFAIK all the Apple privacy stories have been about US cases so as a non-US person I'm also not sure they'd apply the same standards to me.
[+] [-] Inconel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yueq|9 years ago|reply
The issue is we not only use 'services', we handle data to the service providers. Data under their custody is usually stored and transferred with less secure protection, like on a thumbdrive or sent by email attachments. I don't see this situation will get any better soon.
[+] [-] schuke|9 years ago|reply
Hell, even visiting your friend in a hotel requires recording your ID before hotel staff will let you go upstairs (strictly enforced in cheap hotels). Internet cafes' administration system had been linked up to government ID systems more than a decade ago.
This is the Polizeistaat that Hitler could only dream of. It's a whole other level over any credit card surveillance.
[+] [-] Inconel|9 years ago|reply
I'm admittedly not well informed on the subject but I assume this has been going on for decades, are there any consumer privacy laws around this? While I find Google data collection activities worrisome, I at least have some faith in their technical ability to keep that data safe. And unless I'm mistaken Google only sells targeted access but not the actual data which is what the credit card companies and bureaus do.
[+] [-] sailfast|9 years ago|reply
There is a significant difference between this and extensive government data with your name attached, though I agree it's not great from a privacy perspective.
Typically (as has been said) you can opt out of this sharing.
[+] [-] arbuge|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdog|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway91111|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edblarney|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benevol|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vadym909|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowglow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarchowdhury|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delegate|9 years ago|reply
How is this China-only ? Can't Facebook do the same ? Can't the government force Facebook, Microsoft, etc to give out all the information that we generate in their networks ? Can't they compute such a "trustworthiness" score and sell it to your (potential) employer ?
Of course they can and they will if they don't already.
I've agreed to countless "license agreements" which I haven't read - I might have given some company my exclusive permission to monitor my every move...
What if your agreement contained a special clause not present in other user's agreements ?
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that what is going on in China will become the status quo in a lot of other countries and this will accelerate as shit gets tougher due to all the global problems that we now face.
What's even more disappointing is that these surveillance systems are most probably built on top of open source software and libraries - which have been ideologically released in order to increase the user's 'freedom', yet who would have thought ...
Unfortunately the dream of a better, closer, freer world is now passing through a nightmare phase - we've built the perfect tools for crazies to do their crazy thing...
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|9 years ago|reply
And while it's fun to either wave our arms around and say "But everybody's doing it!" or talking about wild dreams of a better tomorrow, the crap we've created is right here, right now. As a technical person, if you're looking for somebody to blame, there's the mirror.
When I was in the armed forces and you needed something desperately that you did not have, somebody would always say "Well, you'd better grow one"
We technical folks do not have the moral underpinning we need to help there be a brighter tomorrow. We're lacking the social and political theory and the historical grounding to understand what kinds of things might help and what kinds of things might hurt. Instead we just imagine how what we're making might help mankind along. News flash: imagining isn't cutting it any more.
We may not have the tools we need to responsibly create the tech we're creating, but we'd better grow some.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|9 years ago|reply
2. The data that is out there is _very_ messy. If you have a unique name and you use it as your twitter handle, sure, this is already happening. It's called Klout. But most companies just use it to figure out what image to put on their coupons.
3. I've never heard of employers asking for someones "trustwrothiness score". We as a society get pretty pissy about this type of thing. We've banned IQ tests, and needlessly asking for credit reports / scores. If a metric like this came out in wide use we'd ban it.
4. License agreements are generally unenforcible. You don't get the right to someones car just because you put it in a license agreement. If you could do that there would be lots of scams trying to get old grandpa to install a new photo app to see his grandkids.
5. What is going on in China is overblown in the media. It's not a episode of Black Mirror. The people that are most impacted by it are politically loud young adults online, but the vast, vast majority of Chinese don't worry about it. There are much more important human rights concerns in China that need addressing like freedom of the press.
6. We're not in a nightmare phase, we're in the same phase we've always been in. The telegraph cables were tapped by every major government, the radios listened to, the phones tapped, we even put recording equipment into televisions we sold overseas, our major hotels have always been tapped (or easily tapped given a court order if a foreign national was in town). This has been happening for over a hundred years.
I agree we should know about it (thank you Snowden) and in some cases I don't like it, but the solution isn't to wish it away, it's to use encryption and not say or do stupid things around computers.
[+] [-] krona|9 years ago|reply
As an instrument of control and coercion, however, there is a massive difference between a government collecting data and not telling you, and a government collecting the data and telling you they use it to calculate your worth to society. The latter seems utterly tyrannical.
[+] [-] dcposch|9 years ago|reply
On one hand...
- China has done better than any other country on Earth at poverty reduction. Chinese policy since Deng Xiaoping lifted hundreds of millions of people out of subsistence poverty. Free markets were a big part of this, but so were Special Economic Zones starting with Shenzhen, a culture of sharing IP, massive govt investments in infrastructure, research and education.
- China are also the most successful urbanists today. Many of those 100s of millions of former rural poor are in cities now. In the time it took California to debate building a single High Speed Rail line from SF to LA, China connected their whole country with trains that are much faster, much more useful (because they go directly into urban centers and connect to fast local transit), and much cheaper. Ours still isn't done.
--
And yet, at the same time, China also seems to be prototyping some kind of grim meathook future.
- Extremely aggressive surveillance. Near zero respect for privacy. Govt deputizing the tech sector to spy and censor on their behalf.
- Cities with toxic air. Check out this glorious ad in Beijing right now: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C1JrMsKUAAAopPT.jpg
- A closed, censored alternate internet
- "Social Credit" Scores based on surveillance, which look like a frighteningly powerful way to neuter dissent
China moves faster than we do, both for better and for worse. I guess our challenge is to emulate the things they're doing right (eg the vastly more efficient and effective way they build transit), while stopping our own governments from repeating China's mistakes and acts of authoritarian overreach.
[+] [-] loeber|9 years ago|reply
This is only true if you're applying a ludicrous double standard. China has done better than most other countries at this because China was extremely poor just a few decades back. Nowadays, much of China is still very poor. Of course it's much easier for China to slash its poverty rates than for an already-developed nation. The real thing to ask about is how long it will take China to bring a western middle-class style quality of life to its citizens.
[+] [-] finid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|9 years ago|reply
It has to be easy to build a new railway when you can just send the police to evict everyone in the way.
[+] [-] battlebot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonh|9 years ago|reply
But you can't so easily dissentangle the one from the other. A lot of their development is so quick because they ride roughshod over property rights, safety standards, environmental concerns and individual liberties to push them through.
[+] [-] patmcguire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaylorAlexander|9 years ago|reply
The US corporate surveillance web is rich in complexity.
Before we judge China, lets make sure we know what we're comparing them to.
I highly encourage anyone interested in the subject to watch this talk from last month's Chaos Computer Club Congress.
"Corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy: How thousands of companies are profiling, categorizing, rating and affecting the lives of billions"
https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8414-corporate_surveillance_digi...
https://youtu.be/kd6NKvwQVbM
You say the Chinese system is sinister because they force you to use ID cards. In the US corporate surveillance system, they can track you without ID cards.
[+] [-] simonh|9 years ago|reply
In China they have routine direct abuses and intrusion into daily life right now and are expanding it as fast as they can. There are no legal protections and the risks are already happening.
If you can't see there's a difference there, I can't help you.
[+] [-] ralfd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 20andup|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] contingencies|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idra|9 years ago|reply
Yes, the governments owns telcos etc. Yes, they probably have files on people they consider a threat, such as human rights activists. But to think that all that data is accessible in some kind of coherent manner is ridiculous. This is China, where banks cannot even access information between physical branches of the same bank because of its bizarrely inefficient IT infrastructure. The telcos have been trying to enforce the "real-name" policy for SIM cards for months, yet you can still easily buy and use a SIM card on the street.
They definitely need help from an app, because private Chinese tech companies are somewhat competent compared to the government IT sector.
Do you really feel safer in a country where you can get jailed without trial, where you can jailed, deported and banned from re-entry based on a urine test at the whim of some provincial government official that you crossed paths with? In China, the biggest threat is the government.
[+] [-] suprgeek|9 years ago|reply
Add to this the fact that both legislative chambers are controlled by the same party who is "tough" on crime.
For profit or to ostensibly address Terrorism expect surveillance to get much worse.
[+] [-] sneak|9 years ago|reply
It allows peoples' inherent belief in American virtue to doublethink themselves into believing that the NSA doesn't collect this high-res data in bulk from Facebook and Google and Amazon and Apple and the mobile carriers—when we have clear documents showing that they do.
LOVEINT is real. The large social networks and communications providers are an official arm of the surveillance state, with all of the unfettered access to high resolution data that entails.
Your doctor or hospital hosts data in AWS? Pretty sure HIPAA doesn't count in this case when they're just sucking up all of the traffic in bulk.
Your social media and financial data are already being aggregated and sold—we know this, too.
[+] [-] xja|9 years ago|reply
I wonder if the information is leaked through hacks or compromised individuals.
[+] [-] chj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw2016|9 years ago|reply
Dial back 10-15 years and try to imagine the response to a news item like this. Hysteria about totalitarianism from the media, endless interviews with academics, ngo and human rights organizations. Grandstanding by politicians and citizens. Where are all these noisy vocal folks? What is orchestrated and what is real?
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
I mean, why not?
They've the got the hackers. They've got the big DB. They've got the absence of laws preventing such a practice.
[+] [-] jilljennV|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjtr|9 years ago|reply
There are only 7 billion people to simulate, that doesn't actually sound like that much anymore.
Obviously one would not simulate every individual with realistic human-like AI, but with a statistical economic model.
How much and what kind of data would one need for this to be useful, for example to predict if a certain new political initiative will actually work?
Or is this already being done? Or is it not needed? Or just still too expensive?
[+] [-] est|9 years ago|reply
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