Data Wake
You're leaving a trail everywhere you go
If you ever get a chance to go on a boat ride on the Potomac, you must go. The views of the Memorial bridge, the monuments: Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, and if you squint, the National Cathedral up the way, all reflect the history and gravity of our capital. When you motor north of the Memorial bridge, there is a “no wake” zone, meaning you have to move a little slower, displacing less water. If you look at a busy river or lake, the wake trails show where all the boats have been, even if they’re around the bend and out of sight.
Did you know your phone similarly leaves a wake?
Obviously, it’s invisible, you can’t see it, but I’m going to show you where to look. Every app you use, every website you visit, every message you send has all sorts of data. Even if the connection is secure, data leaks out like a sieve. Look at this message I got when reading an article the other day:
Look at all data they collect by just by visiting this site! We are even agreeing to let them use the geolocation feature of our phones, if it’s available, to collect our location, in order to better serve us ads. Now, this is a tradeoff. I’m reading the article for free, and the author needs to get paid to support a family, so giving up a tiny little bit of information seems reasonable. But like the wake left by a boat, it’s being spread everywhere.
That’s 64 different groups trying to collect information from you. If only that was the end of the story. Many of those trackers: ad networks, analytics aggregators, social media companies, follow your behavior across the internet. They use all sorts of techniques to try and collect your wake of activity, mostly through IP addresses, which you can imagine like your mailing address. It can change, but not frequently enough to string together a series of data points. And that’s good enough to build a solid portfolio.
Thankfully, we’re not like China, yet, and our internet history and day to day activities won’t be used against us.
But what’s the point of all this collection? We’re entering a new epoch in the economy: “spreadsheets of mass destruction”. Data can be put into equations, given the right weights, and every preconceived notion now has an answer backed up by data. Think about the fights had in the beginning of Covid. All those models predicting certain outcomes were formulas, made by some person, trying to tell a story.
What the industry is moving towards now is having computers create those stories. Every time you hear about Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning, can be translated into some computer trying to create a formula that fits the data it’s collected. At the simplest form, you could train the “algorithm” by giving it a series of pictures that have cats in them, tell the machine there are cats in them, and let the machine try to create formula to use on new photos. Now, you and I both know there are lots of cats out there, so in order to be really good about “seeing” all the cats, you need a lot of pictures of every kind of cat, and in every kind of activity. Really, as many pictures of cats as possible. Now, repeat this training with dogs. And then again with squirrels. And then birds. And now, after feeding the algorithm millions of photos, you have a program that can identify some of the animals you might find in a backyard. If you want to identify more objects, you need more training pictures. You need more data.
If you’re a company trying to figure out what someone might want to buy in the future based on what similar people have bought in the past, you need as many buying patterns as possible. “What if we knew what fruits and vegetables someone buys after buying a blender, and we sent them text message coupons when they walked into a store so they’d buy our brand of frozen strawberries.” There are massive data profiles on everyone, being bought and sold, with precise locations, times, and content. They’re trying to build a why we do something based on who, what, and where we did. At the moment, it’s just to sell us more of what the machine thinks we’ll want, but it can be used to tell us what we want.
In business, you learn data becomes information, which becomes knowledge, and eventually into wisdom. But what is the wisdom we’re really seeking? Humans have never had so much information, and we are paralyzed with making any decision. Data is used to tell the wrong moral in the stories we hear.
This is the future, where data is the new oil, and the person sitting on the largest reserves is going to have the power to shape what we see and hear. But oil was only valuable when you sold it. Data is valuable by not selling it, and selling access to the inferences gleaned from the biggest data piles around.
Buyer, beware.
Cover Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash