Giving The Shaft To Data Mining And Obsfucating IBM & Twitter's Privacy Intrusion on Your Life

Those b*st*rds are going too far. Even though I am a data miner, I have a great concern as a data privacy advocate. Essentially Twitter & IBM are teaming up to mine your Twitter Stream to monetize your posts. They will take your tweets and try to sell crap to you, or worse, sell your data to other companies.

Here's how it will work. If you post that your mother died, you will see a crematorium or undertaking ads. Tweet about spending some time in the hospital, and you might pay a higher health insurance premium because they will sell that info to insurance companies.  The same about driving fast. Tweet about your kid going to college, and you will get a full court press on everything from college choices to clothes for university life.

It sucks. It just isn't right. You have three choices.  You can vote with your feet and leave Twitter. I have already left Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter is my last stand.

You can carry on, but in a previous blog post, I mentioned that the most dangerous thing about Big Data Mining, is that data mining can make assumptions about you that simply aren't true, and you may be categorized into a list that you don't want to be on. It could affect your job, your security clearance, your credit score or who knows what.

You could self-censor, but censorship is wrong, even self-censoring.

I like the last option - f*ck with the machine learning, and deep learning and data-mining.  How? Obfuscate.  Here are a few things that I will do.

1) Disable all location services for tweets.
2) Disable all location services that your smart phone takes. It writes the location into the EXIF data. It also writes date and time and camera type, etc.
3) Google for a free EXIF editor, and remove all EXIF data from your pics.
4) Do not put your actual location in your bio. For example, I follow a dude, who's location is : Where I Have To Be
5) Put in a fake town where you live. If you have a dog named Rover, put down that you live in Roverville.  You can still keep your same state.
6) Never use your middle name or initial. It's just one more authentication factor.
7) When social media streams are mined using NLP or Natural Language Processing, an important part of that is finding "possessive determiners".  Don't use them.  Possessive Determiners are words like my, your, her, etc.  If you tweet "Its my birthday", even the dumbest NLP data mining machine can pick it up. However if you say "Welcome to Birthdayville, Population Me", not even the smartest NLP machine can pick that up. Get rid of possessive determiners in your Tweets.
8) Practice Typoglycemia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia  Here is an example that would totally screw up a deep learning machine:

"I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Scuh a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia .
"Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt."

9) User slang. If your gas pedal foot itches to drive a BMW, call it a beamer or a beemer and don't capitalize the word.

10) Use alternate spelling. Ime a bygg phan of Neel Yoongs mewsic.

11) Throw in rand o m   s pac es   in yo ur  sente nce.  Or e*ven the od*d star will do.

12) Never tweet your age, your spouse or partner (I see married to @sweetiePie all the time) or any other information.  It is okay to list your employment of academic institution and that leave a lot of room to fool the NLP machines if you work at the Big Blue, or teach @ the Yard (thanks to the Harvard profs that follow me -- appreciate it).

Using these simple tips will cause the data mining and perceptrons scanning your feed to take a pass on what you type. Now is the time to bowdlerize or obfuscate your account.

I think that the bigger answer, is to startup a new hybrid of Twitter and Facebook that guarantees information privacy. But in the meantime, let's be careful out there as to what we post.  And remember, its not that difficult to deke out smart machines.

How Many Click-Throughs Do You Get Per Followers When A Link Is Favorited On Twitter?

How many click-throughs do you get per followers when a link is favorited on Twitter?

 I recently posted a link to an article on this blog.  After the initial rush died down, and the hits stopped coming, one of my followers favorited the link.  He has 53,400 or so followers.

How many click-throughs did I get from him favoriting one of my tweets to his fifty+ thousand followers. I got 50 hits or click-throughs.  About 0.1%.  Not bad.

The Twegomaniac ~ The Twitter Follower/Unfollower Egomaniacs

My goodness, call me James Audubon and fly me to the moon.  I have discovered a new species of bird ~ the Twegomaniac.  This was a rare big that is becoming quite common.

The bird is part of fauna that exists in the Twitterverse.  There cry is "Follow Me, Follow Me" and to get you to do that, they follow you first.  But they are like the cuckoo bird who fools its host.  Once you abide by the Twitter netiquette and follow them, they unfollow you.  It's all about them.  They are the birdbrain egomaniacs who thinks that size matters.  They were born with a small size, and to try and enlarge it, instead of having the personality and content to get followers (like Jesus, Ghandi or Clint Eastwood's Empty Chair), they have to resort to trickery.  They just don't have the right stuff.

So how do you know if you have come across a Twegomaniac in your follow list?  The biggest clue is that you have never heard of them, and they have 100,000 follows and 200,000 followers.  The other identifying feature is a big asshole.

So how do you protect yourself from these odious creatures and droppings that they leave all over your home page before they leave.  There are a plethora of tools out there to help detect unfollowers.  I have been known to use the free aspect of manageflitter.com as a pest control method.  There are many more.  Beware of the Twegomaniac.

The T.co domain -- Twitter

So I was idly looking through the analytics and traffic stats of my blog, and I see t.co as a visiting domain.  Curious, I check it out by typing it in the URL address box.  Turns out that it is the domain shortener for twitter.  Above is the message that pops up.  To learn more about this, type in t.co into your browser and click on the Learn More button.

Twitter Follow-Backs

(click for larger image)

I have officially stopped. I have stopped playing the stupid tit-for-tat followers games. I got the above this morning in my email saying that I was being followed, and that we would have a pact, and if I followed they would keep the follow and if I unfollowed them on Twitter, they would unfollow as well.

Bully for them. I am tired of playing this game. I will return to my true self. I will not follow ghetto rap artists. I will not follow girls more intent on showing their breasts rather than reading my content. I will not follow fundamentalist, racist Republicans.

I will just follow people and accounts that I am interested in, and will not follow you just because you follow me. Inflated follower numbers mean nothing. I have conducted experiments on how to convert followers to web hits, and the only way to do it, is to emulate the religion model. Anyone who is a true follower, will check out your website. Anyone paying lip service and just playing the tit-for-tat following game cannot be converted to web hits and is uninterested in what you have to say.

So most of my followers are real now. If you want to follow me for real, I can be followed @ArtOfWarm. If you are interesting, have decent content, and are not trying to sell me something, I will follow you back,

Sorry Twitter - You Lose in Generating Web Hits

I like to treat the internet as one big test subject, and when you have a couple of blogs, you can do some fascinating experiments in internet metrics and crowd behaviour. The aim of almost every posted video, picture, blog entry and image is to go viral. The holy grail of this technology-driven world is page views and web hits. There are entire books, websites and courses dedicated to generating website traffic.

Once you put something up on the internet, you can either wait for the search engines to find you, hope that the What's New section profiles you or you can link advertise on other social media. But very few people know the most effective means to get hits.

I decided to have a mano a mano, a head to head to find out ...... (are you ready) ....

THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO GENERATE HITS WITH LINK POSTING

In one of my blogs, I posted this picture that I took on the shores of Loch Awe in Scotland. It is the Robert the Bruce Chapel in St. Conan's Kirk. When I looked at it, I said "Holy Rigor Mortis, Batman, this looks like you dead!". Sure enough, it looks like the grave of a dead Batman. I thought that this was a suitable subject to go viral.

(click for larger image)

So, posted competing links on Twitter and Reddit. I used the same title "Photo of Dead Batman" and the same tags including #DarkKnight, #Photo, #DeadBatman.

Twitter generated six hits that hour. Reddit generated 170 hits in the first hour.

Clearly we have a winner when it comes to generating hits by link posting on social media. And to think that I have been ignoring reddit.com.

(Disclaimer: I am in no way associated with Twitter or Reddit).

A Standard For Twitter Hashtags

I follow Bath Rugby players on Twitter, among other things. I notice that some of the team are avid users of Twitter. They are also quite inventive with hashtags. Hashtags are much more than search tools. They can be cleverly used to create innuendo, a wry comment, a joke, or a commentary all under the guise of just being a hashtag.

However, I do propose a standard for hashtags. It is quite simple, and one that we use in computer programming for variable names. The standard is this: Every time that you come to a new world, use a capital letter. It vastly enhanced the readability. It could also change the meaning:

#psychotherapist

or

#PsychoTheRapist

So if everyone would adopt this readability standard for Twitter hashtags, the world would become a slightly less confusing place, and we would be doing our part to fight chaos and entropy.

New Paradigm -- Crap Software

I am amazed at how flaky Twitter is, and yet it is a major force to be reckoned with in social media. Often times when I try to log it, it says "Twitter is busy now. Try again later."

Just this morning, I tried logging and saw this message:

SSL connection error

Unable to make a secure connection to the server. This may be a problem with the server, or it may be requiring a client authentication certificate that you don't have.

Error 107 (net::ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR): SSL protocol error.

I thought that it was something wrong with my machine because the error was thrown by 127.0.0.1 which is localhost or my computer. So I tried logging into Facebook, and there was no problem. I immediately knew that it was another Twitter issue.

It blows me away that there is a new paradigm in software -- putting out crap or buggy software, just to occupy a market space. The bugs get fixed later. If Twitter were production software in a company, it wouldn't cut the mustard.

In a similar vein, I use GIMP a lot to manipulate images. For the most part, it is OK, but when you do a series of transforms on the graphic, it has a tendency to crash. Regularly. GIMP is free, so you can't complain too much, but it still represents the concept of a less-than-perfect element thrown out to the public.

I'm willing to bet that what we will see, is software becoming obsolete before all of the bugs are fixed.

Is there anything to be done about it? I doubt it because although Twitter is a private company, and hasn't made money, it has huge potential to transform into super currency like Facebook did. As long as there is no financial incentive to put out good software, we will get buggy crap in our virtual worlds.