The Commodification of Private Lives and Political Profiles

One of the most disturbing aspects of Republican gutting of the FCC's privacy rules late last month only came to my attention  when Cathy O'Neil delivered a stunning lecture at Ithaca college Thursday evening. Titled after her book  Weapons of Math Destruction, the presentation explained the use of algorithms to capture our private information in order to profile and manipulate us. You can read a pretty good piece about her book by Mona Chalabi in the Guardian(Oct 27 2016). With the repeal of those FCC Rules our search information, political preferences, personal choices are now being collected to be sold to companies who can refine your feed based on algorithms designed to reach a 'desired' outcome. That outcome could be anything from trying a new drug for the post traumatic stress disorder you've been reading up about, to telling you who you ought to vote for based on your political searches. The release of this personal information will likely be used to codify your habits giving the media manipulation machine a birds eye view on your life. There's a piece by Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan from Democracy Now on March 30 if you want an overview.

The Electronic Frontier's page gave a run down of what Comcast, Verizon and AT&T won't do with your info. As far as I can tell the statements are meaningless. Profiles will be kept on you.
Those profiles will be used without your knowledge or consent, and it will not be easy to see what they've built around your information because these algorithms are created by private individuals or companies and are the intellectual property of those who design them, regardless of the fact that they use your private information to do so. Oh, and because they are written mathematically, it would be quite difficult to find out what it means if you actually got a hold of it.  You'd need an interpreter who speaks math. The public needs to know who the people are who write these algorithms, and more importantly who funds their work and dictates the parameters to be used by the code writers? If some private corporation is interfering in my personal and political life, I need to know who they are in case their actions cause any harm.