I am completely mystified by a these sort of articles and the deluge of apocalyptic warnings -- specially when applied to the web in the context of data being used to make money.
(I do share data leakage and privacy concerns).
I use an Apple phone, so I can't comment on the mobile targeting scenarios re Google.
However, I have been using Google and its web services (email, search) for over 10 years now for both work and personal use. I have bought maybe 2 products as a result of their ads. After installing ad-blockers, I simply get no advertising now. None. Zero.
The same applies to Facebook. I use the mobile app almost exclusively and see no ads or simply ignore the promoted stuff. None of it seems to be location based. For example, I enjoy whisky but when I open the app in the middle of a whisky store, I get no ads or promoted links.
So where is all this data matching and targeted advertising?
How effective is it if any person with a modicum of intelligence can take simple steps to avoid seeing all the annoying crap?
To me it seems that these companies, specially FB, are working on a foundation of sand -- the companies are built and run on the basis of "we can sell intelligent advertising" and the marketing execs fall for it and throw money at them without any measurable results. Google has a more solid use case (they searched for it, so show them an ad that is provably relevant) but Facebook....? Seems like a house of cards in the long run...even if they can implement merciless targeting they are afraid of doing so as it would result in backlash.
Meanwhile, the tech behemoths use this shifting sand to conjure money out of nowhere and continue fueling the computer industry -- with some good benefits re. facility to share stuff with people you want, hardware improvements, contributions to open source, advancements in AI, research, etc. I guess just enjoy it while it lasts...
For me -- apart from dreams of a society where we treat ourselves and each other with honesty instead of sleaze, and what synergistic effects that might have -- the main issue by far is that once the data is there, once the channels are established, it takes very little to use them for other things. I can't find it right now, but reading either Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner I stumbled across a bit where it's pointed out that the dream of a Gestapo officer would be a map that shows the relations between people. Maybe I misremember it a bit, but not much.. it was something that really was uncanny and creepy, because it wasn't written with future technology in mind, the kind we already have spanned the planet with. It showed out that we're far beyond what even the people worried about Nazism 2.0 could dream of. Yay, what a treat for us.
The current state of things is a wet dream for for totalitarians in some ways, you can simply record everything now and then use whatever algorithms you like on it later. Some of the people who warned about the technology and our apathy even back then might say it's way too late now. The fact that we now say "Is it even a problem? Why worry about something that might not happen?" kinda shows something doubleplusungood is going on. Once the only thing between you and a totalitarian hell is how the wind blows, with no other recourse than hoping for the best... well, that's kind of a vacuum, nature abhors and is filling it.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
I am waiting for my copy to land in the mail before reading this.
You are correct, LRB is generally not easily fooled into writing puff pieces; O'Hagen is a very sharp writer (check out his masterly analysis of Assange who is much more capable of blowing smoke than Wright).
My prediction is that this will be looked upon more as a an essay about digital con men, and this is why M-K Willmers allowed it to be published.
Hey, it appears you're shadowbanned. I vouched for this comment because I don't see how it violates any rules, and it seems on-topic and useful. I checked your history and every comment you've made over the last several months (at least) is marked dead, which means only people who've enabled the "showdead" option in their profile can read them. It's a shame as most of the ones I saw look fine.
def snmp_command(session, oid, media_servers):
result = list()
for host_name in media_servers:
snmp = SNMP_CMD.format(host=host_name, oid=oid)
snmp_reply = [x for x in session.cmditer(snmp)]
if len(snmp_reply) == 0:
log.warning("No data for EMS Media Server SNMP cmd {0} for host {1}".format(snmp, host_name))
continue
# add the Media Server host from which we got this reply to the list of snmp reply
snmp_reply.append(host_name)
result.append(snmp_reply)
return result
As I said, not you, particularly. But bad typists exist, and they tend to want to type less, which leads to code that is worse than it could be.
That said, where's your docstring? Why are your lines longer than 80 chars? Why is your indent 2 chars instead of 4? What does `oid` mean? http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
