Phillip Dick was so right when he said these words.

Recently I read a story about a man named Matt in the East Coast of United States who claimed that Facebook somehow figured out his very deep personal secrets even before he shared those with anybody else including his family.  Read the story here. Tracking your personal data and popping up related ads is nothing new. The little cookies left on your computer by websites were used for this purpose. However, what scares me is that this has gone to a completely new level now. It’s no more as simple as deleting the cookies and getting rid of the hack.

What is backing this silent upsurge hunger towards your personal attributes and behavior is a massive technology referred to as “Big Data”. Large corporations with heavy computing muscles - Facebook, Google, Amazon and numerous other faceless ones as well - have built the capabilities of tracking every little aspect of what you do – not only in the virtual world, but also in physical world – and then run complex intelligent algorithms to figure out your deep rooted secrets.

In Matt’s example, he commented twice on an article regarding “Equality in Marriage” on a website that was powered by Facebook Open Graph APIs. The website provided the facility to comment on its articles using Facebook’s infrastructure. As a result Facebook algorithms picked up those comments and presented Matt with those recommendations concluding that Matt was a gay. There are examples where the large retail stores in the US – like Target, Wal-Mart, etc – track your “check outs” and derive a pattern about your preferences, likings and developments in personal life.

There are three very important observations that are very relevant from this example

• Matt’s behaviour was tracked from a normal website and not directly from Facebook. The website used Facebook APIs and that’s how the comments reached Mr. Zuckerberg
• The algorithms are now so sophisticated that they can identify very indirect relationships between two not so related things – something a human bran may also miss
• The data and its analysis is out there with the big giants. Its no more on your own computer like the good old cookies which you could clean up and get rid of them. Matt will never ever be able to erase the impression Facebook has made about him.

Scary? Yeap.

Big Data is here to stay. Pirates of the Internet Sea are equipped with huge engineering muscles. Whether you like it or not, they know enough about you. Is there a way to hide? Well, the only option is to exercise little caution while in the virtual world. Think twice before liking a page, putting a comment and clicking on “plus 1”. Ask yourself whether it is really required? Are you ok if this is made available to everyone in the world? Most importantly to the most genius algorithm written by the best minds in the technology world?  If the answer is “Yes”, you are safe.

Posted by Amol Mategaonkar

Mumbai