** ** There's A Thin Line Between Tracking Terrorists And Tracking Consumers****
Geoffrey Ingersoll, provided by**** | August 15, 2013**** http://www.chron.com/technology/businessinsider/article/There-s-A-Thin-Line-Between-Tracking-Terrorists-4735760.php **** ** ** **** Algorithms used to target terrorists are the same ones used to target**** consumers.**** ** ** Granted, one set is targeted for drone strikes (and now drug arrests) while* *** the other for t-shirts, nonetheless, the similarities are striking.**** ** ** As we recently reported, Unit 8200 is Israel's tech intel unit of arguably** ** the best military intelligence gathering apparatus in the world.**** ** ** Matthew Kalman of The Guardian shows how former 8200 alumni use the same**** complex computer algorithms that track potential enemy communications to**** also help create marketing/advertising software for companies that want to,* *** for example, match "clothes and accessories to suit your taste."**** ** ** So private companies track user metadata - location, search history,**** browsing history, etc - on the web in order to market products. This is why* *** if you search "photography" several times, your Facebook page will feature** ** advertisements for photography products.**** ** ** Consequently, the NSA tracks metadata in just the same way, for much the**** same reasons.**** ** ** A lot can be told about a person based on metadata alone, whether it's from* *** web browsing or from telephone communications (really from any**** communications).**** ** ** James Ball of the Guardian cited an appellate court's opinion when it came** ** to just collection of location metadata from phone transmissions:**** ** ** A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a**** weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful**** husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of**** particular individuals or political groups," it read, "and not just one such **** fact about a person, but all such facts.**** ** ** That's just telephone data, the government also collects metadata from**** browsing on the web. And, no different from private companies, a clear**** picture of a person's likes, dislikes, personal habits, even patterns of**** movement, begins to emerge even if they don't necessarily know that person's **** identity.**** ** ** The valuable nature of said information is not missed on intelligence agents **** and marketing agents alike.**** ** ** >From The Guardian:**** ** ** "A lot of the practices and the technology that we used in the army are used **** today at Stylit to address the problems we are aiming to solve in fashion,"* *** said Yaniv Nissim, a former 8200 programmer who designed the company's**** algorithm by combining the wisdom of former army tech geeks with fashion**** industry stylists. "The technology is mainly machine-learning technology.*** * It's how to take huge amounts of information and from that to understand**** users' behavior."**** ** ** Kalman himself sums it up best, writing, "most fans of Stylit, a website**** where a virtual personal stylist matches clothes and accessories to suit**** your taste, are unaware that it uses technology adapted from algorithms**** originally developed to track and prevent suicide bombings."**** ** ** ==========================================**** (F)AIR USE NOTICE: All original content and/or articles and graphics in this **** message are copyrighted, unless specifically noted otherwise. All rights to* *** these copyrighted items are reserved. 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