If these companies learn everything about everyone, what happens if what they discover is that most people have their own little problems and health issues and craziness? The truly awesome people with absolutely nothing wrong with them? Good luck finding them!<p>As far as the migraine bit goes: there are already some sorts of medical discrimination that are illegal to use for hiring in the US, though I don't know exactly what is and isn't currently allowed. But analyzing someone's FB posting to try to find out that they suffer from migraines seems like the sort of thing that violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the law and would quickly get shot down. And the Affordable Care Act is already taking steps towards making it illegal for insurance companies to abuse this sort of information. If you don't like the scenario in the article, keep that in mind next time you wonder about whether government regulation is ever appropriate.
I don't think this scenario could play out that way.<p>- Facebook profiles can be made inaccessible to non-friends. People who post pictures of themselves naked and using drugs use this feature.<p>- The hypothetical conclusions drawn are only possible if users post extremely frequently and in great detail. Otherwise, the predictive analytics will suffer from garbage-in-garbage out. Huge companies spend millions of dollars collecting decent data, and the claim here is that a 16 yr-old's facebook profile will have high quality data.<p>- If the situation presented in the article gets <i>even close</i> to coming true, people will know about it and compensate. The end game won't be all-knowing companies, it'll be SEO for social media profiles that make people look good for a fee.<p>[edit: removed meanness]
I think this just reveals bad hiring practices, more than anything else.<p>There are 1,000 different things that can affect your productivity. Maybe her migraines cause 15% "lost productivity", but her enthusiasm causes 35% better quality work, her daydreaming cuts 10%, and her intelligence adds 20%, the fact she's stimulated by spicy food adds 5%, etc.<p>Companies that might attempt to do this kind of micro-analysis miss the forest for a few trees, will be less competitive in the long run, and over time will die out.
It might be unpopular to say it out loud, but I would bet most HN readers have at least one person on their Facebook page they would not hire base on what they've seen posted there - people they might have otherwise considered hiring. I hope the scenario posted in that article doesn't play out on that scale, but it's surely already happening at an individual level. Great read though!
Let me present a slightly more dystopian twist to this already unpleasant future scenario.<p>In the future the pool of jobs that require a human and do not require an Olympian level of focus and dedication that few people can hope to achieve without major sponsorship is going to be quite small. In other words the job market is going to become even more of a winner take all contest, and less of a matching market.<p>The question the hiring committee will be asking will be "Given her past history, if we hire her will she be one of the top five negotiators _in_our_industry_?" and if the answer is no... then she might not find a job at all.
Here's an easy one somebody could write up over the weekend:<p>You apply for a job with a resume. The resume lists the dates you worked various jobs.<p>So you just go out and comb the social networks to find all the posting times for this person and cross-reference it with their work hours. You've just made a predictor of how much time they'll be spending on your dime trolling the net.<p>Now perhaps that's only 1 in 20 secondary factors you look at in hiring. But I bet it's easily one of those 20.
This definitely will happen. Like 100% sure. It happens right now, the beginning. And facebook won't be some magic data provider, maybe they'll supply 1-2% of all data if the company will survive for so long at all.
Behavioral prediction will be Very precise. And you won't be able to anything, all endpoints will be controlled - ISP, cell operators, physical stores that sell hardware, banking, payment alternatives (bitcoin etc.). They are mostly controlled now, there is just no such precise and powerful analytical programs.<p>This won't be end of the world or the internet. Not even close to it. Things just will be different in the future and people would accept them.
I simply don't see the benefits of Facebook as outweighing the creepiness and totalitarian potential. What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction, that is worth giving them information on a good portion of the websites I visit, the social interactions I have, the pictures I take, etc.?
The hypothetical analytics company in the article scares me, because I'm pretty convinced it will exist at some point.<p>I mean, there are already quite a lot of people who try to do it, but at some point, someone will achieve non-garbage enough results and use them to screen job or insurance applications. Or will just be good enough at marketing to convince insurance company that the results aren't garbage.<p>It's probably fine for people who can afford to refuse a job offer based on ethical issues, but the overwhelming majority of people don't have that luxury.
So what? Company A does not want you because of some stupid unscientific mumbo-jumbo, you just head to Company B on the other side of the street.<p>This is only a problem if no employer wants you at all - if they have enough safe applicants so they can reject anybody even slightly unsafe.<p>But that, even if it would happen, not a Facebook fault.
The narrative is also likely to play out this way:<p>"Well, 9 out of 10 candidates we interviewed has some sort of health problems. Tina is great in all other fronts, I guess we'll just have to live with it."<p>But regardless, social judgement/ranking is zero-sum game, if someone is losing out due to some social change, others are winning.
I believe this is not only a Gen Y nightmare, but nightmare for all social media users that are oversharing or lack the time / energy to properly clean up their social media presence.<p>It's hard to have a public presence to say, >1000 friends on facebook. As a user since 2005 back in college, I witness my peers and my Facebook usage evolve from 'a social network with personal sharing' to a 'bare wall with a few instagram picture uploads / article sharing, and essentially a contact list'. It's sad, but inevitable - how personal can sharing be, when the friends list is over 1000 and some of whom are no longer actively in your life? Of course no one is to blame but the user (myself) that added too many friends. However, this issue is quite common in many users that approach their 3-4th year of using facebook; less personal sharing, more 'contact collecting'.<p>I wonder if what everyone thinks of a service that helps clean up the social media, or even more broadly, online presence of individuals. www.123people.co.uk tells you webpages/ social media accounts/ pictures/ articles about a person just by typing in first, last name and a region.<p>With facebook recently opening up email addresses for companies to target their ads (<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/20/facebook-crm-ads/</a>). One can only imagine where our information is shared and <i>sold</i> to corporations.<p>It is a shuddering thought.
I've always said we won't create the first strong AI, we'll just wake it up.<p>I hope its friendly. The selection pressures we're putting on its ancestors (to systematically weed out the people who aren't valuable to us) aren't instilling me with a great deal of confidence.
Facebook appears to be immune from privacy concerns. No matter what they do, the average person will keep using it. So what's to stop facebook from offering a "Narrative Data" style service of their own?<p>If facebook said, "we're going to show potential employers and insurers a report based on your activity" do you think that would be enough to get people to delete their accounts? The average college student isn't going to significantly change their behavior because of a hypothetical job offer in a vague future. Most of the people they know will also be posting party pics and talking about health issues...they aren't doing anything wrong.<p>As other comments have pointed out, no one is perfect. Everyone has something they don't want people to know, and most of those things aren't a big deal. Even if facebook prepared and sold general reports about everyone's activity, I don't think it would cause enough harm to get people to stop using it.
I think this kind of profiling will be done on baby-boomers and gen-xers, too, using records of purchases. I believe every US store records who buys what when. This information will never be erased. It will end up being sold to aggregators who will then be able to sell the record of everything you bought since you became an adult. Even using cash will not protect you once face recognition becomes cheap. I think the only way to prevent this scenario is with legislation, as Europe is doing.
A lot of people are focusing on whether the specific scenario in the article could possibly come to pass, but they are missing the big picture: the Internet is unprecedented in that it remembers <i>everything</i>. This is why it is a horrible idea to use online services that force you to drop your anonymity: if you put your personal information on them, then <i>someone</i> will mine it and use it against you at <i>some</i> point in your life.
While data mining on this scale is only barely science fiction, I don't see it progressing it this far for a number of reasons:<p>1. Users. Once Facebook users learn that their public data will be used for these purposes, people will en masse make their profiles private. Not everyone will understand what is going on, but everyone with enough Facebook friends will figure out from their friends to make their profiles private.<p>2. The public. Public outrage is a powerful thing. Data-sharing on such an unprecedented scale would almost certainly trigger public outcry and/or boycott. People have an alternative to Facebook: G+. A boycott would not be such a big tragedy for people. Plus, you don't want your website to be known as the one that can get people fired.<p>3. Government. This is related to number 2. If enough people get mad, then Congress may pass laws to stop Narrative Data and similar companies from producing personal data mining products.
I think this is a little pessimistic. If you have the capability to be able to predict a persons life, personality, etc. for the capability of hiring someone, you also have the capability to match people with their dream jobs. Ones that they would excel at.
Even I breathe in the world of information management & data science, I never thought about this possibility!<p>I for one hope this should never happen. Mining your data to do pattern matching whether your are healthy or not? Are you kidding me? We tend to forget there is something "socio technical gap" (as demonstrated by Mark Ackerman - bit.ly/UqlNLI), meaning our social world cannot to be mapped into virtual world using technology since tech is not mature. We will never be able to close the socio-technical as our brains are too complicated.<p>I fear for our kids if this is future.
What about someone who <i>don't</i> use Facebook, linked-in etc? When the resume is sufficiently high in the hiring stack, the automatic online crawler could very well respond something like "no sufficient data for analysis".<p>I would not be surprised if the blame avoider that passes for a recruiter chooses the safe route and do not hire the person.
Shoeboxify is trying to offer a way to archive your personal and intimate memories. It is not a complete solution to the issues the article is raising, but it is an attempt.
<a href="http://beta.shoeboxify.com" rel="nofollow">http://beta.shoeboxify.com</a>
I think this mostly relies on the assumption that all of Tina's posts are public. What of by 2018 people will learn to make all of their facebook posts friends-only?
LinkedIn scares me more, because I think most 22-year-olds don't really foresee that they might have the need to change their career histories. The idea that you might have to bump your college degree by 5 years is unimaginable at age 22.<p>I don't foresee myself ever needing an explicit lie, but it's hard to keep a story consistent over 20 years. The online paper trail is a bit scary. I wouldn't even have a LinkedIn profile but it occasionally comes in handy to have access to the people in the network.<p>I think more people are going to be burned by consistency risk (even unintentional and non-deceptive) than by what we tend to think of as garden-variety embarrassing stuff.<p>I also don't think anyone with data mining talent is going to work for health insurance companies doing intrusive cross-site work for less than a million per year (we're talking about work that isn't just unpleasant or boring but actually <i>evil</i>) and I can't see those companies paying that much. They'll hire more cheaply and get crappy work and the world will be fine.