[Claudio Fantacci]

#1584

Hi @paolomarenco, unfortunately for @giuliavezzani and I is a “Not Participation to the Tour”.

We hope to keep in touch with you all for possible future meetings/talks and project.

[Claudio Fantacci]

#1540

Hi everyone,

I’m Claudio Fantacci a postdoc researcher of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa at the iCub Facility, Humanoid Sensing and Perception.

I attended Paolo’s talk at the Università di Genova, and I found the Silicon Valley Study Tour an attractive project and a great opportunity for anyone studying and/or working in any tech field.
Silicon Valley companies are leading the digital revolution and shaping the digital world we are living at this very moment, at a pace we can barely understand.
I believe that projects and initiatives like SVST is of central importance for both students and entrepreneurs. There is a cultural gap between how we see the world and the one envisioned by the tech companies that must be filled.

On a larger scale and in a broader sense, I think that a significant part of this vision is based on the use of big data (together with specific tools) to help and assist people by predicting their needs.
Here is where things get interesting: what is one’s need that can be satisfied with big data?
The answer is very unclear (or, if you prefer, the question is ill posed) and can range from “How can I suggest someone to drive from place A to B based on the average traffic jam at peak hours?”, to “How can I use targeted ads based on user preferences to increase revenues?”, and even further with “What should I say in this particular state to convince people to vote me?”.
If you think about it, they are just different needs.
This connects us with the VICE article, and for what seems to me the most important part of it: the Kosinski’s statement “This is not my fault. I did not build the bomb. I only showed that it exists.”.
“Big data” have been around for years now, but only recently they have attracted so much attention. As an example, read this article where the term “big data” is never used, but it is clearly under the hood.
Cambridge Analytica focused on a very particular, narrowed need and they succeeded.
This is no different from any other company or start-up focusing on other specific needs.
As also @paolomarenco said during his talk, start-ups shall focus on a particular problem and put all the effort to solve it.

Many other tech companies we daily rely upon, take our data and sell them to third party companies for their own business. And believe it or not, we agreed to let them doing so when we accepted the licenses to use their services.
I think that this time our perception on the use of big data is different and somewhat uncomfortable, is because we feel accomplices of the outcomes. Don’t you think so?

To reply to some of the comments I read so far, I don’t think there should be any strict regulation to be enforced by authorities on the use of (generic and sensible) data given by the people, as long as they agree to do so. This could be dangerous for many reasons including the net neutrality. On the other hand it is clear to me that there is not yet an Internet culture among us. People need to be acknowledged of the risk of using internet, from agreeing to licenses to providing their information (of any kind) to websites.
What do you think about it?

It is also funny to notice that, sometimes, when you speak with someone about data collected by third parties and the impact they could make depending on their usage, you often get appointed as a paranoid. Yet, we are here discussing about it. Has it also happened to you?

To conclude, here are some provocative questions:
– how many of you knows what data Google collects of you? You can find some info here: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/#infocollect
– and Facebook? See https://www.facebook.com/policy.php
– how many of you knows the existence of https://encrypted.google.com/ ?
– do you know that thanks to EU laws we can ask Google (and other companies) “The right to be forgotten”? See https://support.google.com/legal/contact/lr_eudpa?product=websearch
– what is your default browser? I have been using https://duckduckgo.com/ for quite a long time now. Have you ever heard about it?

[Author]

Posts