Ideas inspired by kai and Molly's "the surveillance economy"

It's Good Friday, a national holiday here in Canada.  No significant plans for the day - I love it.  Just got back from walking my dog while listening to this week's podcast episode of Make Me Smart - titled "the surveillance economy".  So many ideas I'm now scrambling to record before they leak out of this old brain of mine.

I work for a software company that innovates and sells encryption technologies.  Many times a week I try and explain to companies and organizations that we can help protect personally identifiable information (PII) while retaining the analytic value of their data.  Many global customers are either required to protect PII for regulatory (legal) reasons, such as the upcoming GDPR in the EU, while others wish to reduce the risk and associated cost of a data breach.  But, these same companies are also trying to get the most out of their data, trying to understand their customers better, how to cross-sell their products and services, or to find and cut back fraud.

Now let me try an segue into the news of the last few weeks about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.  I like buying stuff.  I like good advertising.  And I am influenced by advertising.  I believe it's very hard to avoid advertising and I find it a waste of space and time when I see something that I have no interest in.  How many more ads for bowel issues and reverse mortgages do I need to see when watching  TV news channels.  But on the flip side, I find it incredibly unsettling when I see an ad online for a specific product I researched just seconds ago.

Another tangent into the brilliant mind and writings of Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and Homo Deus.  In the later, Homo Deus, if I try to paraphrase and interpret one of Yuval's closing arguments - the impact of any one of us on the world today is diminishing and assuming your scientific beliefs eliminate the possibility of an afterlife, then what will be our legacy and what is our contribution to society?  Yuval focused on the information age, i.e. data.  We can contribute data, information, ideas, art and knowledge to an incredibly massive amount of people, perhaps all of mankind through this thing called the internet.  I am truly on that side of the fence, I do share lots of things with many people and feel I'm contributing a little to "the greater good".  I believe it's an incredible waste of one's life to keep all your passions, learnings and creations to yourself - isn't that rather selfish.  Needless to say, I'm not a very private person.

Back to my work life.  Along with many companies that wish to get more value from their data, there are just as many who wish to share their data with third party business-to-business partners.  I'm sure much of this is with advertisers, but the optimist in me believes that some of these partners are in the field of research and are perhaps trying to improve our well-being.  For example, large health insurers have massive amounts of data that can help with the research into drug interaction and root causes of disease.  Wouldn't you want to share some of your health data if it could help your neighbour or world populations?

It's natural that the more I share, the more people (and companies) know about me.  That's the deal.  Although a lot of what I share is under the somewhat psuedoanymized alias of PJMixer, it doesn't take a data scientist to figure out my real identity.  But I digress.  I feel the problem comes down to the granularity of information and precision to which advertisers target consumers.  

In my work with encryption, we are creating new ways to vary the degree to which data can be protected with the goal to protect PII, but increase the statistical value of the data once it's protected.  For example, telco and auto companies record geo-location data about us all day long.  The precise coordinates of my home and where I am at any one point in time is of course very private.  And similarly, the fact that the government knows my date of birth and that Air Canada knows the date of my flight to Winnipeg this year is data I'd prefer non-friends didn't know. But is there a major concern if you know I live in Toronto and I traveled to Chicago in the last 6 months?  Or that I am male and was born in the 60's?  That's useful, monetizable information for airlines and hotels as well as for Health Canada and the CDC.  That is something I don't mind sharing and then as a consequence perhaps seeing more ads for airlines and hotels than diapers or feminine hygiene products.  Maybe statisticians in 500 years would find it useful to know that there were large numbers of men in their fifties that traveled regularly from Toronto to Chicago in the years 2010 to 2019.  And what about those colourful student paintings on the windows between Ohare's terminals 1 and 2 - shouldn't everyone have a chance to see that beauty?

Time for introspection

Perhaps inspired by A Wrinkle in Time (I'm reading the graphic novel version), reading a few year end messages on Facebook and the start of a new year, I thought I'd try and collect my thoughts on time, reflect on my time and the balance of time.

Although I love being entertained by the idea of time travel, from my understanding and Einstein's theory of relativity, time travel is not possible.

However, I do believe that we at the brink of extending our lifetimes and immortality will be a possibility in the future if we accept our evolution into a life form enhanced with technology.

But for me, today, January 1st, 2018, time is a finite resource and at the age of 53, time is something I think about quite often.  One of my biggest annoyances is a waste of time, either induced by my own action / inaction or when other actors waste my time.

I'm not necessarily saying that I'm focused on improving effectiveness or optimizing daily tasks and regular processes, but rather reducing obvious time wasters and making the most of what time I do have.

Possible time wasters:

• trying to find something to watch on television or Netflix
• researching purchases of products and services that I don't have an immediate need for
• making myself busy when work is slow
• trying to decide on meals
• watching sports on TV
• attending business calls that have little relevance to my job
• watching CNN

Moving on to the bigger picture, what should I do with the time I do have?  As previously posted, I have a lot of different interests and can see my awake time divided into learning, doing, creating and entertainment.  I try to maintain a balance, but what does it all amount to?  I hope my decisions enrich my life, I've always liked that word enrich - a simple, warm, but crisp two syllable word. 

en·rich - inˈriCH,enˈriCH/ (verb)

1. improve or enhance the quality or value of.
"her exposure to museums enriched her life in France"
synonyms: enhance, improve, better, add to, augment; 

But enriching my life on its own is selfish and misses out on other wishes I have in my life - enriching the lives of others.  Work and family life is the obvious canvas for this aspect of my life, but I'd like to think I can have a bigger impact on the lives of others.  Although I do give quite generously to charity, I'm guilty of not directly getting involved with helping less fortunate people.  I hope to find something in the future and I'm open to ideas others may have here. 

I also think there is another opportunity to enrich the lives of others and if I may be so bold, leave something behind when I die.

I've been reading Youval Norah Harai's Sapiens recently and loving his perspectives and how humankind got us to here.  But it's his newer book Homo Deus (recommended by a good friend a few months ago) that I read first and has impacted me the most (although I haven't finished Sapiens yet).  If there's not really the concept of a spoiler for works of non-fiction, let me touch on one hypothesis that has stuck with me than I'm using to justify my motivations to share.  

Re: Dataism.  "If life is the movement of information, and if we think that life is good, it follows that we should extend, deepen and spread the flow of information in the universe".  Harari goes onto talking about the modern world of "Record, Upload, Share" as a good thing and I've chosen to add this "simple" thing into my personal beliefs.  So that's why I share and I share quite a lot.  I'm not saying I'm tossing privacy out the window and I'm pretty uncomfortable with full disclosure which is so nicely featured in the book and movie entitled The Circle).  Related in many ways, my job and career is all about educating customers on cyber security and effective ways of protecting personal information.  I can help customers enable big data analytics without disclosing private information of individuals.  Most of us feel we're just a small part in a massive machine.  Well, that's right, but the system cannot function without contributions from many people.  

Coming back from that unplanned (and admittedly incomplete) two paragraph tangent, the point I'm trying to make is that I think it's a good use of my time to publicly share my findings.  Notice I'm not necessarily saying I'm sharing my life, but the stuff that I find that I think will be helpful or worthwhile for other people, I believe it's my job to pass it on.  As some of you know I share movie reviews, photography and new music discoveries, and here on this blog I occasionally share deeper thoughts about my life that I hope others can perhaps relate to.  So, I'm going to continue to do this.

There are still so many distractions, but I hope that 2018 is the time I get a clearer picture of my small and large contributions and I can say I'm making the best use of my time and enriching my short journey aboard this blue orb.

Although this post was inspired by a new year, apart from a few book and movie mentions, it doesn't include all the wonderful things that happened in 2017.  For that, you'd get a very good idea my looking at my photos on Flickr or perhaps my posts on Twitter.