In October 2010 Newsweek’s Jessica Bennett asked the the team behind the Internet service Reputation Defender to find all they could about her.
The results were startling, within half an hour they had found her US social security number and a few more hours digging revealed her address, hometown as well as many other private details.
But ultimately the picture of Jessica’s life was wrong. The team made mistakes about her personal habits, sexual orientation and the time she spends online.
The fact the profile was incorrect shows how difficult it is for computers, or people, to understand an individual based on a series of data points.
Most of us understand that making a generalisation based on single data point – say race, gender, appearance or sexual orientation – is usually incorrect, but when we add more data points things become even more difficult.
Once we get more than one data point, we have to start weighting them. Would Jessica eating at McDonalds twice a week outweigh her exercising every morning in the eyes of an insurance company assessing her risk?
That problem could be called the Google effect where a formula, known as an algorithm, becomes so complex that it becomes bogged down under the weight of its own assumptions as we saw with Tony Russo’s gaming of the search engine’s ranking system.
All of us as are steadily revealing more about ourselves onto the web, whether we know it or not. Every time we like something on Facebook, subscribe to a newsletter or make a comment on a blog post, we are giving a little something about us away on the publicly accessible Internet.
Over time, anyone can build a picture of us. However it may turn out that nobody will want to know about the detailed, complex and multi dimensional portrait each of our lives would be.
As information about all of us becomes more available, we may enter a modern version of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine of the Cold War as each of us find that everyone around us has enough information to bring our careers, relationships and status crashing down.
But equally we hold equally damaging data about all our peers as well and to bring anybody down based on this information we have would be to invite the wrath of many others who know about our intimate details.
We may even find that because all of us, being human, have some damaging traits and history that employers, insurers and governments only care when you start hiding them. Today we see this with security vetting procedures which are more concerned about what we hide rather than the specifics of our foibles and indiscretions.
The assumption of those security agencies is that a self admitted gambler, alcoholic or philanderer is a manageable risk while those hiding such secrets from their families and employers are the genuine threat to an organisation.
So we come back to a society where a tacit agreement exists between us all that this dangerous power is only used when someone has acted illegally or hypocritically.
Perhaps that is the future we are heading for, where the Internet knows all but we simply choose not to access it. Which assumes it’s all correct anyway.