In 2014, a German information scientist began to gather information about articles from the German digital newspaper journal “Der Spiegel.” For two.5 years, he scraped over 100,000 articles in addition to the related metadata, corresponding to publishing time, part, and creator. After accumulating the information, he started to research it. One in every of his findings was that he was in a position to predict which authors of “Der Spiegel” had intimate relationships with one another. Moreover, his outcomes supplied insights into the interior personnel construction of the corporate itself.
This instance already reveals the true hazard of the clear human. With solely a small quantity of knowledge that will not appear notably harmful, you’ll be able to achieve extremely private insights about a person. Whereas I wouldn’t assume any unhealthy intentions on the a part of David Kriesel, the German information scientist talked about above, there are teams that will view every part in another way and need to have an effect on you. They search to vary habits and want to manipulate people for their very own benefit.
One in every of these teams was Cambridge Analytica — a British consulting firm that was allegedly concerned within the political campaigns for Brexit and the Trump presidential marketing campaign of 2016. Their primary idea was to make use of information from Fb actions to…