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ACLU clip

Snort. Whenever I order a pizza, they can't even get the damn toppings right, and more often than not they get lost on the way here even though I'm on the same street as the place I order from. I'm really not worried about what they'd do with all my personal information, seeing how if they did assemble a dossier on me it would be full of the wrong information entirely.

That's my suspicion about all data-collection sinister plots: there's simply too much data to do anything at all with it. My monthly credit statement runs to four pages, and I'm just one person. Can you imagine trying to not only gather all that info on millions of people, but then trying to make sense of it?
 
TragicMonkey said:
Snort. Whenever I order a pizza, they can't even get the damn toppings right, and more often than not they get lost on the way here even though I'm on the same street as the place I order from. I'm really not worried about what they'd do with all my personal information, seeing how if they did assemble a dossier on me it would be full of the wrong information entirely.

That's my suspicion about all data-collection sinister plots: there's simply too much data to do anything at all with it. My monthly credit statement runs to four pages, and I'm just one person. Can you imagine trying to not only gather all that info on millions of people, but then trying to make sense of it?
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Good point!

You forget though, that the Gubment has those big ole super duper computers that can store everything, and sort it twelve ways from Sunday!

(Just don't tell the IRS, they'll want to upgrade their TRS-80s ;-)
 
TragicMonkey said:
That's my suspicion about all data-collection sinister plots: there's simply too much data to do anything at all with it.
Click to expand...

Depends on what I'm trying to do with it.

My monthly credit statement runs to four pages, and I'm just one person. Can you imagine trying to not only gather all that info on millions of people, but then trying to make sense of it?
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Pretty trival is you have a decent database although building up a generaly picture of an indivudal from raw data is still rather hard to do.
 
geni said:
Depends on what I'm trying to do with it.



Pretty trival is you have a decent database although building up a generaly picture of an indivudal from raw data is still rather hard to do.
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Databases are only worth the data put into them. Can you imagine dealing with trillions of records, from hundreds of thousands of different sources, in different formats, received at different times? Duplicate information, information that looks duplicate but isn't, incorrect information, missing information...the sheer scale of the project would make all the little annoyances that occur in databases overwhelming. You can't just design a database and throw in all the data. A lot of the data will have to be cleaned up, and by the time you get halfway decent data halfway in, it would be outdated.

I don't see this as being possible, on a national scale, to the degree suggested in the clip, with our current level of technology. Maybe in a few decades.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Databases are only worth the data put into them. Can you imagine dealing with trillions of records, from hundreds of thousands of different sources, in different formats, received at different times? Duplicate information, information that looks duplicate but isn't, incorrect information, missing information...the sheer scale of the project would make all the little annoyances that occur in databases overwhelming. You can't just design a database and throw in all the data. A lot of the data will have to be cleaned up, and by the time you get halfway decent data halfway in, it would be outdated.
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There are ways around that. offer most people a chnace to win a car and they clean up thier own data


I don't see this as being possible, on a national scale, to the degree suggested in the clip, with our current level of technology. Maybe in a few decades.
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Could do it tomorrow if you picked the right person. Most of the trickly databases shown (health, crime levels in various areas) already have people who work on sorting the them.
 
billydkid said:
Obviously, had I known that this had already been posted, I wouldn't have posted it. Am I supposed to feel ashamed or embarrassed or what? I'm trying to determine what precisely is your point.
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Perhaps as a FYI for everyone? I often post a link to an older thread that discusses the same points etc. I think it is interesting to read such threads.
 
geni said:
There are ways around that. offer most people a chnace to win a car and they clean up thier own data

Could do it tomorrow if you picked the right person. Most of the trickly databases shown (health, crime levels in various areas) already have people who work on sorting the them.
Click to expand...

I have four wonderful examples from my own career of why both those suggestions are optimistic to the point of laughability, but when I wrote them out to post them I realized I'd be violating three legally-binding nondisclosure agreements as well as a couple of laws in one case.

So I'll just say that in my career so far I've had my hands on gigantic databases in four extremely different industries, the smallest consisting of records pertaining to a few hundred thousand people, the largest consisting of pretty much everybody living in the United States for the last fifty years. (For titillating examples, I've seen the Social Security Numbers of five of the last six presidents.) And despite these companies having spent millions on their databases, and millions more on getting the data, it was still largely garbage. People cannot be trusted to fill in a form correctly, ever, and even the most brilliantly designed database ever (like the ones I've designed) are utterly at the mercy of some underpaid person (usually a temp) who's going to type or scan that data in. So you can open up a billion-dollar database and call up some records and see "DO NOt USe THIS FEILD: BARBARA P SAID NOT!!!P" in the middle of what's supposed to be the list of the company-breaking financial records.
 
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