Enterprise amnesia and the thickness of people
A significant problem for organizations (and governments) is that data is discrete. eg, a Las Vegas casino wants to know if someone they’ve already thrown out is making a new hotel reservation under another identity; or a care agency doesn’t want to place a child in a home with a violent criminal. The inability to link these things is enterprise amnesia. (Something the UK govt currently has a lot of.)
Jeff Jonas works on Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness - trying to make those links. One point he makes is that as you add data eventually you get to a tipping point where the data starts to collapse. That is, say you have records of Wendy Grossman, Wendy M. Grossman, and various misspellings of those. You don’t know at the moment whether these are all the same person, but as you keep adding records eventually you add one that links some of those misspellings so that these apparently distinct people begin to collapse into a single person. This is what alarms privacy advocates; and yet, says Jonas, there are more and more increasingly cheap weapons that can do more damage than a nuclear weapon.
Jonas also makes the point that fabricated identity is harder to find than a stolen one because in the case of identity theft someone complains. This is the thickness of people: someone in their 50s who’s never owned a car or house, had a job, and has no educational rcords is much more likely to be fabricated. This person is thin, in data terms. Of course, this also might be simple lack of documentation…
wg
March 26th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
What does he mean by cheap weapons that do more damage than nuclear weapons? He’s a really original voice; someone needs to ask these questions such as where data sharing actually takes us.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Another point about subtle data corruptions, mis-spellings, etc is that it reveals infomation about the structure of data sharing network itself and the routes used to prolierate data.
March 26th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
Re thickness and thinness of people’s identities and the clue that that might give you to whether or not they were fabricated.
I found myself wondering the other day about techniques that might be used to re-gain aspects of anonymity in the context of the funamental change in the privacy environment that children growing up on myspace et al. will suffer and the perhaps currently unknown future macroscopic societal effects that this may cause.
I wondered about chaffing (the release of even more perhaps contradictory information to obscure the original) but on the Internet a lot of information has time stamps so it’s often possible to identify the first.
So I wonder whether, in order to preserve privacy, you would have to release false information ahead of time, or in an identity environment to have a number of fabricated identies ready ahead of time.
Does the witness protection programme and similar institutionalised identity changing processes only work because they manipulates databases which are closed or non timestamped?
March 27th, 2007 at 3:03 am
He mentioned something complicated whose details I didn’t quite catch involving dug-up Eskimo DNA, home printing, bacteria, and some other stuff that are becoming increasingly affordable. I think basically he was thinking of biological weapons.
wg
March 27th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
What he was saing wat that you can buy a gene sequencer for $100,000 and download the pattern for smallpox from the net.
March 29th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
I suppose there’s a scale of technical protection for privacy - will the greater progress be made with personal tools and techniques (PETs, crypto, steganopgraphy, chaffing, whatever) or the corporate/gopvernment ones(surveillance, data retention, matching etc). At one end we’re in control, and at the other end we’re controlled and powerless.
…and a second scale of regulation: is this left to the market or is it regulated . At one end it’s a free market beyond what the US is like today, at the other a regulated one beyond today’s Eu model.
This gives us four possible futures…
March 29th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Pre-emptive chaffing needs a pretty enlightened degree of awareness…forget silver spoons: is this part of what responsible future godparents will do for new-born babies?