The researcher behind Facebook’s prediction algorithms called his own work creepy
Evidence
Kosinski observed that “all of our interactions are being mediated through digital products and services which basically means that everything is being recorded.” He even characterized his own work as “pretty creepy”: “I actually want to stress that I think that many of the things that… one can do should certainly not be done by corporations or governments without users’ consent.” Recognizing the woefully asymmetric division of learning, he lamented the refusals of Facebook and the other internet firms to share their data with the “general public,” concluding that “it’s not because they’re evil, but because the general public is bloody stupid… as a society we lost the ability to convince large companies that have enormous budgets and enormous access to data to share this goodness with us.… We should basically grow up finally and stop it.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 861
Categorization
- QUESTION: Kosinski frames the data refusal as public stupidity rather than corporate self-interest - worth interrogating whether this inversion itself signals the asymmetry he claims to lament.
- XREF: connects to: Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854
Broader Connections
- Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent.
#expands(0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854