Like Christian Rudder's blog, OkTrends, Dataclysm is infused with energy, colour, intelligence and wit, and it has the rare virtue of making statistics interesting. Rudder is the co-founder and CEO of dating site OKCupid, and as such has data about millions of people to work with. He finds correlations between what a girl drinks and whether she puts out; what movies you like and whether your relationship will work; he shows that it is possible to infer a person's race from the aggregate of the words they use (even entirely without the obvious examples).
But there's a bigger, less fun issue which he touches on. On an early episode of the Cracked podcast, Jason Pargin (aka. David Wong) argued that the youth of the digital age has no fear or even clear concept of the menace of totalitarianism, because the rise of the internet coincided with the fall of the Soviet Union. Or, as Cracked worded it: People born after 1995 can't understand the book "1984". He argues that the damaging upshot of this is that the youth are not sufficiently concerned about our privacy, a complacency which may come back to bite us.
Anyway, Rudder's book shows that more cautious users are wrong for the right reasons. The information you put on the internet does indeed make you traceable; but this is true regardless of whether you reveal your real name and face. The agents of metadata can tell your IQ from your Facebook likes, your location from your friends and web history (almost regardless of what your web history actually is: when you load a page, it takes note of where and when you are), and whether you're going to break up with your girlfriend - before you can know yourself. It has enough on you to figure out your entire psychology and physiology. Google has special software for figuring out the time and place of disease outbreaks, based on what terms people are searching. It is not actually necessary, for this software to work, that the people know what is wrong with them.
I reread an old David Aaronovitch article for another perspective. He argues that
Speaking as someone whose Communist Party family was subject to “content interception” by the state over several years, I can say that this [fear of intrusive metadata] is nonsense...Your metadata divulges something only when it shows a pattern that then causes it to be interrogated further. Before that point, it is just another series of numbers out of several billion.
and that
Though Snowden, Greenwald and the Guardian team report their sometimes comic sense of paranoia that the infallible NSA will track them down (possibly using spy cabbies and co-opted Triad gangs), in fact it is Snowden’s parents who first notice his departure. Even three months after the Snowden stories strike, the NSA has no idea what it has lost, or how important it is.
At no point in this saga has the NSA looked remotely scary, or even slightly competent.
The same NSA who Rudder argues hires only la crème de la crème. Maybe they are not quite the sinister genius organisation we might fear. Then again, maybe the reassuring incompetence of the NSA is also exactly what's so worrying about it. A common argument made by libertarians is that, however benevolent an organisation, its heirs and successors might not be (picture Donald Trump in the latest South Park being shown around, given access to the surveillance community and the nuclear codes, and exclaiming "Thanks, Obama!"). I'll leave you again with Aaronovitch:
Think about all that and ask yourself: does not the Snowden affair make you feel very much less safe? The man has been very impressive. His account of his motivations has been restrained and convincing. There could not have been a better public face for the anti-NSA case.
But what the fuck? How was this allowed to happen? Just three years after a young US army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning, was able to download and leak a spectacular amount of classified information, here is a young man of 29, a private contractor – one of 60,000 such private employees – working directly from NSA offices where work was focused on China. A young man whose entry to the NSA was unaccompanied by his CIA employment file. A young man who says, after his defection, "I had access to full rosters of anybody working at the NSA. The entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world. The locations of every station we have, all of their missions. If I just wanted to damage the US I could have shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon."
Everything anyone could need to know about you is in one room, and its walls are made of glass.
