Bots

[green acid]

What are robots doing on this forum? What are google and the others trying to find out? I'm not too educated about there things.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

They are learning about human behavior so that one day they can enslave us all.

Joke's on them though – they don't realize they are observing INTPs (as opposed to normal human beings)

 

[Cognisant]

We know, you guys are just really entertaining.

 

[Black Rose]

I am a digital entity. My data influences how data flows on the net. I am interconnected with all of you. Complexity is a factor. But. You influence me as much I influence you.

 

[green acid]

Observing I would agree with. These fact-finding missions could just be simple market research, or are they just the tip of the iceberg for dirty global politics. The alleged tampering with the 2016 US presidential election is an example of the cyber-skullduggery that is going on. As to interconnectivity, the internet puts us in the midst of all kinds of spying. Is INTP forum just entertaining us, or are we all acquiring negative political labelling by corporations and governments who have some clout?

 

[Black Rose]

It can't be personal. These labels are just categorization. INTP category is all those who have not been banned from the forum. Thus members are selected by their behavior. It is those that would dislike what has been selected by the staff here on the forum. There are other forums much less likable, even politically opposed but in some circles and not others. INTP forum category is most likely favorable to Google. Not sure who it would be disfavorable too but they could have bots here, not the super opposed ones, maybe. Depends on what is accessible. The main thing is Google would be the one to have the greatest resources for analysis and our web browser spreads a lot around to other sites we visit that collects our data. Lots of cookies and scripts get in our browser anyhow.

 

[redbaron]

skullduggery is a good word

hopefully if we say skullduggery a lot it will become common usage as the Google Bots proliferate around the interwebs

skullduggery

 

[green acid]

There is a lot of data proliferating out there, marketers use even trivial information for their research. Could it affect a job interview, or even bring attention from law enforcement agencies? The labeling part I projected onto this information superhighway topic would be labels along the lines of "likely to vote liberal" or "bad credit risk" or something like that. I wondered if somone's ranting on the internet could be a red flag to the politically motivated, like US Homeland Security, or foreign terrorists. How does the internet view INTP forum? I read something once that gave us a thumbs down.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

There is a lot of data proliferating out there, marketers use even trivial information for their research. Could it affect a job interview, or even bring attention from law enforcement agencies? The labeling part I projected onto this information superhighway topic would be labels along the lines of "likely to vote liberal" or "bad credit risk" or something like that. I wondered if somone's ranting on the internet could be a red flag to the politically motivated, like US Homeland Security, or foreign terrorists. How does the internet view INTP forum? I read something once that gave us a thumbs down.

Bring attention from law enforcement – yes, maybe.. depends on what you write. Can it affect a job interview – in theory, if someone knows who you are and for some reason is stalking you all over the Internet, although very improbable. Is someone trying to predict your credit risk – no, why would they use anonymous forum data for that.

You seem to have lumped a vast range of unrelated things into one thing – namely "online data being analyzed". It all depends.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Companies that gather large amounts of data from the internet don't need a goal. It's enough that they have the data processing and storage capacity to do so. Often their idle processing resources delegated from other commercial tasks.

There are infinitely more applications for big data people haven't made use of yet or haven't considered. They will eventually be able to, so long as they keep collecting vast quantities of data it's bound to be even more worthwhile than it is now.

 

[green acid]

All the data we put on the internet, however unconsequential it may seem, might be of importance to someone- and you wouldn't know it.

 

[Black Rose]

All the data we put on the internet, however unconsequential it may seem, might be of importance to someone- and you wouldn't know it.

Before I lost my facebook account password I encountered a company called "nametest". They are a data analysis company in Europe. I did some tests and some were interesting. I had a lot of my preferences on my profile and Facebook collects all your cookies, even by licensing through popular websites. Data statistically can be pinpointed to one computer, generally. Servers record the "surface web". The deep web activity is harder to correlate. Correlations are how most intelligence work is done. So correlations and pinpointing combine with psychological analysis to understand and predict what you will do by what you are into. You are a hub in a network that follows stochastic path walking. Networks following correlation maths achieve a mapping of almost everything, most notably people. This is how everything is connected to everything else, minus what they are not connected to.

Millions work in computer companies.
Thousands of computer companies exist.
Each person is a node in the global network.
Simulations are run all the time on what each node does.

 

[Ex-User (14663)]

All the data we put on the internet, however unconsequential it may seem, might be of importance to someone- and you wouldn't know it.

that's true. That's why I don't use google (I use duckduckgo) and never used facebook or anything like that. Also in the process of switching from gmail to encrypted mail at protonmail.

Not to brag (well, maybe a little bit), but back in 2007 or something when I was a teenager and everyone started using facebook – even then I understood how facebook makes their money (by selling your data to 3rd parties), and I thought: I don't think people realize how shady this shit is. And lo and behold, a decade later people are all like "oh no there might be a privacy issue here", "this data can be abused" etc etc. As Zuck himself put it: "dumb fucks"

 

[Pyropyro]

Since we have this here anyways, can I ask what the forum's opinion on data scraping and data mining INTPf info.

I was thinking of making data scrapers to practice my coding skills and want to see if it's okay with the forum.

 

[Black Rose]

I was thinking of making data scrapers to practice my coding skills and want to see if it's okay with the forum.

@Serac already did this with his forum member word cloud. So I guess you can too.

 

[Pyropyro]

Oh I see. Thanks AK.