yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Big Data by the Numbers | Explorer


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

I'm Richard Bacon. Let's talk about surveillance. But let's do it quietly because they're probably listening. That thing in your pocket that you call a smartphone, it's a tracking device that just happens to make calls. Digital tracking has become a part of our everyday lives. It is how we answer our biggest questions.

When are those cute shoes going on sale? What happened to that cute girl I knew in high school? Where's that cute commander of ISIS? [laughter] That's right. The same technology that targets terrorists is also being used to sell you Halloween costumes for your dog. You're probably aware that companies are collecting your data. But you don't know the half of it.

Let's run the numbers. [applause] 1,500, that is how many pieces of information data company Acxiom has on every single consumer in the United States, 1,500. If you asked me for 10 interesting pieces of information about myself, I'd struggle. Acxiom bundles your information into profiles with catchy names like "Men in Trouble," and then sells them to advertisers.

"Men in Trouble" is the file made up of married men who've recently searched for flowers and chocolates. [laughter] In trouble. 91-- researches at the University of Pennsylvania found that when you look up-- this is amazing. When you look at medical symptoms online, 91% of those websites are sharing your searches with third parties, even shipping the information directly to the same brokers who monitor your credit scores.

In other words, everybody knows about your weird rash. 300-- according to a recent study, it takes just 300 Facebook likes for big data to know you better than your spouse. The algorithms used by Facebook are so good, they can predict your sexual preference with up to 88% accuracy, which means Mark Zuckerberg knows you're gay before you do.

0-- that is the amount of messages that you have deleted in your life. There may be a Delete button, but there's no such thing as delete. Apps track every key that you push. You can find anything you want online except for privacy. And those were the numbers. [music playing] [applause]

More Articles

View All
Separation of Powers and Checks and Balances
This is a great excerpt from Federalist 51 by James Madison. Just as a reminder, the Federalist Papers, which were written by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, were an attempt to get the Constitution passed, to get it ratified. So these were really kind of…
Gordon Ramsay Explores the Medina of Fez | Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted
[Music] I’m in Morocco, North Africa, to discover the hidden colony secrets of this incredible country. I’ve always loved Moroccan food because every bite is steeped in history. Over the centuries, the Arabs, Spanish, Ottomans, and French have all left th…
It’s the Diseases We Get As We Age That Kill Us | Breakthrough
Researchers at the Buck Institute in Northern California are looking for ways to prevent the many diseases associated with aging by slowing the aging process itself. To discover drugs that will one day increase health in human beings, researchers start mu…
What's Driving Tigers Toward Extinction? | National Geographic
[Music] The tiger, the largest of the big cats, is also the most endangered. The population of wild tigers has declined more than 95% in the past century. What’s driving tigers toward extinction, and can we save them? Fewer than 4,000 tigers remain in th…
Quadratic approximation formula, part 1
So our setup is that we have some kind of two variable function f(x, y) who has a scalar output, and the goal is to approximate it near a specific input point. This is something I’ve already talked about in the context of a local linearization. I’ve writt…
See the 1,000-Year-Old Windmills Still in Use Today | National Geographic
There are ancient windmills in Nashtifan Village, which is located in the northeast part of Iran. What makes Nashtifan’s ancient windmills unique is that they are still operational. One of the main characteristics of the area is the strong winds that blow…