Knowledge is power (and someone else has it)
I grew up hearing that knowledge is power. What I didn't see coming was how much of it a handful of players would pile up with predictive models.
Knowledge is power. At least that’s what people used to say when I was a kid, and somehow the idea stuck with me as I grew up: whoever has the information is always one step ahead. What I never imagined was how much control a handful of players would end up with thanks to predictive models.
From the bargaining table to the weather forecast
On a small scale, in a negotiation, being the one holding the key fact can tip the scales. Even in everyday life, knowing something about someone lets you shape how you talk to them to get what you want, or even change their mind about something.
On a large scale, decades of weather and climate measurements have let us build predictive models that tell us whether it’ll rain or shine tomorrow.
Now put the two together.
Your digital footprint
Everyone has a digital footprint these days. Even in places where people go without almost everything, they rarely go without a smartphone. That means our information is sitting somewhere on the internet, and some data enrichment company has probably already scooped it up to build a profile of who you are, what you do, what you like and what you don’t.
I’m not talking about sensitive data, although that’s out there somewhere too. I’m talking about ordinary data, the kind you don’t think twice about, which once aggregated can feed behavioural prediction models. And those models power highly targeted campaigns built to nudge one specific person towards one opinion or another.
We saw it with Cambridge Analytica and US political campaigns, but I’m convinced we get hit with this kind of thing every single day, for all sorts of reasons.
Whoever has the information is still one step ahead. The difference is that now it’s a handful of players taking that step, at scale.
Why Europe is turning to Linux
And I have a hunch that’s why more and more companies and public bodies across Europe are betting on free software: moving their computers over to Linux and relying less and less on US companies and subscription models. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is migrating tens of thousands of workstations to Linux and LibreOffice, and in Denmark the Ministry of Digital Affairs itself announced it was ditching Microsoft Office.
If you don’t control the software you run, you don’t control where your data ends up either.
I made that switch a while back, for far more mundane reasons (I wrote about it in Switching to Linux). Now I’m starting to think it was the right call for reasons that never crossed my mind back then.
In the end, we’ll own everything and be happy, I guess.