Weaponized Data: Using You Against You

I know many people that have sold their soul to Mark Zuckerberg. And while they continue to post to get that dopamine kickback and feel good about themselves, that data is stored in a database in a quiet building no one has ever cared about. And they are doing it for free. What they do not realize is that they are collecting ammunition to use against them. All your weaknesses and desires. They know. They know everything.

"Yeah, if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard ... Just ask."
Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

---

Why should we be worried about our data and who that data is available to? Because it can be weaponized. See the Zuckerberg quote above. I weaponized that quote against the CEO of Facebook in order to lead you in a certain direction. In the real world, however, people are not going to tell when they are using your information against you. They are just going to go ahead and use it.

Your information is valuable. With data, we can perform analysis and derive conclusions. We can perform transformations on the data and run the data through several models. From this analysis and running different predictive models we can come to certain conclusions. Conclusions that can make the corporate overlords very happy and very wealthy.

But who cares if social media entities sell your data. You post about pointless shit. It is not like you are advertising your social security number or taking a selfie with your credit card. Well, algorithms can take useless information and turn that useless information into something meaningful if it can find correlated events. Oh, you happen to take lots of pictures of food you ordered at lunch time? Bombard the person with food advertisements at 11 AM.

But calling data that is used to optimize marketing is far from something that is weaponized. Sure, the advertisements are targeting people explicitly, but those people have a free choice whether or not they respond to the advertisement in a certain way. But any reaction--even a negative one--becomes even more information that can be fed to their researchers and algorithms. Another way to optimize. With dynamic pricing, your past behaviors and tendencies can be used against you to get you to perform certain actions.

Outside of marketing, such information becomes dangerous. Think about how governments could use such intelligence to coax certain people into behaving in certain ways. The most obvious use of data to manipulate behavior is that of propaganda. But instead of general propaganda, they can now target specific groups in order to get the maximum desired result, whatever that result may be.

For example, let's say a government wants to go to war in order to secure resource rich lands since the current government is not cooperating in the desired way. War is not very popular. But with the vast amounts of data that different companies have collected, the government has offered these companies billions of taxpayer dollars to buy access to that data.

With the data, they build personalized campaigns vilifying the target government for committing crimes against humanity, genocide, and other actions. They also run a campaign against independent journalists that could expose their propaganda. Once they have swayed public opinion, they declare war and maintain the support of the people. Everybody wins except the people who live in the country that is now being attacked.

Now one may argue that such an example is taking this proposition to an extreme. Me posting on Facebook is not going to convince me to support war. You might think that now, but people are incredibly gullible. In a time with lesser information and propaganda, the US government was able to convince a majority of the people to support a war in Iraq, despite Iraq having little to do with the terrorism that the US was attempting to defeat.

But, back then they could manipulate facts. Now they can manipulate your feelings. And let's be honest, people take actions on their feelings far more than they do with facts. So given the right stimulus you can emotionally manipulate an audience given that you have enough information about them.

And I have not even gotten to criminal activities. Think about the blackmailing opportunities. Oh, that embarrassing picture of you. You may think that you deleted it, but let's be honest. They probably stored a backup somewhere on that database in that quiet building we were talking about.

Wait you could lose your job? Yikes, well better pay the ransom before we leak those very rude things you said about your boss on that video you never thought was getting out.

---

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They trust me. Dumb fucks."
Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

---

Sources:

Image
Zuckerberg IMs

---