Santa has been an early adopter of large-scale data mining and AI predictive algorithms to compile this year’s list of Naughty and Nice. A (naughty) elf secretly shared a copy with me.
Naughty
The AI industry: engineered the biggest data theft in human history to train its AI models, running roughshod over intellectual property, copyright and personal data rights in the content it just took. It just took all that data, without anyone’s consent, without paying for it, and without any transparency about what it was taking. And despite a lawsuit here or there, the industry seems to be getting away with it. But Santa saw it. AI-generated slop and AI scams, built from that stolen data, started infiltrating every aspect of our lives, with things getting worse, and the AI industry that made the tools to create this slop and scams washed its hands of the damage it was creating. Even AI companies have trouble distinguishing real from fake, good luck to the rest of us. But Santa isn’t resentful, and he gave the AI tech billionaires a free one week vacation to learn AI scam techniques in Nigeria, and their teenage kids are particularly welcome too.
The online ads industry: a giant ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and online ad exchanges continue to develop ever more intrusive and secretive data collection, monitoring, profiling and targeting methods. The industry increasingly uses “fingerprinting” to uniquely identify you and me and everyone online. For example, I clicked on some random news website: it informed me that it would share my data (basically everything it was technically able to collect) with its 1436 partners…and that I was invited to visit the websites of each of those 1436 partners to understand what they would do with my data. (This absurd farce passes as “consent” to the processing of my personal data, in the grotesque world of online advertising.) The online ads industry has become a giant data orgy, and guess the role that you and I play in that orgy. Santa offered the online industry honchos a free one week vacation to Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island, to join a seminar on the legal concept of “consent” led by ex-Harvard-President Larry Summers.
Third-party cookies: everyone’s favorite online tracking tech was on death’s watch as a privacy-invasive untenable technology, until Google decided to cease its efforts to phase them out. Google abandoned its project to improve privacy online. https://www.theverge.com/news/653964/google-privacy-sandbox-plans-scrapped-third-party-cookies Why? I’m guessing, because the ecosystem of publishers, advertisers and ad exchanges just enjoyed the current data orgy too much. Too bad for individual humans whose data will continue to be shared (or abused) amongst thousands of “partners”.
E.xtremely L.oud O.bnoxious N.arcissist tech billionaires: Santa just wants them to STFU. Santa offered E.L.O.N.s a free one week vacation to Nelson Mandela’s former cell on Robben Island, in solitary confinement.
Nice
The Irish Data Protection Commission continued its pretense to regulate privacy on behalf of all of Europe in its role as the “one stop shop”...flop…and successfully finished another year doing nothing to upset the big tech geese laying the golden eggs in Dublin. You can’t be nicer than that to big tech. Its sister regulator in the US, the Federal Trade Commission, spent the year doing even less, in a Trump/Musk-induced organizational coma. Santa offered them a one week vacation to a Buddhist retreat, teaching them how to accept the destruction of the world of privacy without stress.
Individual humans are starting to wake up and fight back to preserve their world: real people are waking up to real threats to their freedoms and privacy. Real people are starting to object to building large industrial data centers in their backyards. Real people are starting to object to AI models taking their data to train their models, or deepfake their voices or faces, or to make basic human decisions about their lives, like getting hired or fired, or scamming them. Real people are starting to object to the mass surveillance system that the open web has become. Santa offered them heart, brain, and courage…just like the Wizard of Oz.
How about you?: have you been naughty or nice this year? Santa knows the naughty ones have gotten much, much richer this year, because the other 8 billion people got a little poorer, stealing their data from them, little by little, invisibly. This trend is not your friend.
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