People aren’t security conscious enough.
I could say people aren’t “privacy” conscious enough, but I really do mean something more thorough than that.
It’s not too difficult to comprehend the notion of associating website visits and their times to a particular person. Unique identification of a browser, and its connection to an IP address – shared or not – is old tech.
However, people don’t understand the subtleties which are possible. Take YouTube, for example.
Imagine watching a video using the proprietary Adobe Flash.
Since it’s proprietary you don’t know what it’s doing. Don’t pretend like there is any sort of security because it’s “inside” of a web browser, it’s not sandboxed or secure in any way, it’s running out in the open on your computer like any other application.
You open tabs and watch videos. Just as with web sites or pages, you can imagine that the videos you watch can be uniquely associated with their viewers. But take it further.
Flash knows a lot:
- If the player has focus or not.
- The volume level, or if muted.
- When multiple videos are being queued at the same time.
- When a video is paused and started.
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When a video is re-winded or seeked.
There is also automated transcription. What we see as users seems quite rudimentary, with the most embarrassing mistakes, but it’s easy to imagine a better transcription being made on-demand or there being a better transcription which isn’t available to mere users.
So let’s combine automated transcription with video play, pause and week knowledge.
Now the video knows the content being viewed — more accurately, the content being listened to — as well as where the user has given more attention.
So imagine watching a video, and not just volunteering that you watch a video, but also volunteering what parts you are most interested in.
Did you watch the entirety of that speech? Did you skip ahead to see a certain speaker? Did you seek multiple times as though looking for something specific? Did you pause multiple times in succession as though transcribing?
Did you rewind then pause to see her tits? Well now that’s on your permanent record.
