by Michael Brunnbauer, 2013-07-27
When I log into Facebook, I do not see all activities from all my friends but a subset chosen and ordered by an algorithm.
A scoring algorithm determines if I get credit/insurance and at what rate.
One of the reasons for the financial crisis was that financial product engineers failed to grasp the complexity of the real world with their models.
The Google algorithm decides what I find when I search. How much money has been spent in gaming the biases of this algorithm instead of making the websites better for the users?
People with a good Klout score get things for free. This is not bribery?
People have been denied entry to the USA because of harmless jokes or the books they bought. Other people have been arrested as terrorists due to harmless private SMS viewed out of context.
And there are still people that think a Yottabyte of data about people in Bluffdale is not problematic? You do not even need evil people for it to be problematic.
They said that 9/11 was possible due to a lack of imagination. What irony!