The Internet of Behavior and the wisdom of Lincoln

Over twenty years ago, in a criminal justice conference, I asked a white house counsel what seemed to be a fundamental question at the time: Is Privacy a Privilege or a Right?

This was a direct result of working with both the Health Department and the Justice Department with what appeared to be conflicting objectives. The Health Department was obsessed with HIPPA and the Privacy Act. The Justice Department was focused on data collection and data sharing as the best tools to fight crime. I wanted to show the correlation between social data and criminal data and prove the direct influence of education, income, and other social factors on behavior and crime. My thoughts were driven by the concept of investing in education leads to a lesser need for jails. This social justice concept was my initial love for data. I felt that data was the new commodity as it becomes information leading to intelligence. Despite my background in Artificial Intelligence, I had no idea what the future will hold while knowing that data was the new gold.

I was waiting on the counsel for enlightenment to help me manage this duality of contradicting objectives. “It Depends” was the answer I got that day. It was a typical lawyer answer that I grew to expect.

Gone the days of rights and privileges in a world dominated by Social Media where the truth is a virtual story and values are measured by likes.

Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as “Government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Does that mean If “the people” LIKE on social media, they can click their way into defining new government, policies, and direction? If so, the birth of Social Media Nations is upon us. If crowdsourcing is the new norm of capital funding, it seems that crowd influencing is the new way of nation-building.

In 1856 Lincoln defined government as follows: “Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much”. Lincoln had no idea that changing public opinion will become a science, a business, and an art. He remains correct, however, in his depiction of government but I shudder at the mere thought of our ability to change opinions with minimal cost and with such a speed. If the government is for the people and by the people who will then protect the people from themselves? If something is not on google, does it exist? If Google has a political bias who can show me the truth? If world maps are changing and political ties are dragging us into a direction that google supports, searching for the truth cannot be a google function! We must have fact-checkers, validators, and truth protectors. We need a system that preserves the facts as they were, the words as they were written, the sounds as they were recorded, and the images as they were captured in their raw form unaltered, unfiltered, and untouched.

What used to be preserved in books is becoming a digital representation that needs to be preserved for generations to come. In a Post-google world, who will be the judge of truth and the keeper of history? No doubt we are given information beyond comprehension and we slowly rely on the machine to decipher this universe of data points. We do have amazing capacity and capability, but we are also vulnerable at the mercy of man-made engines. Preserving knowledge is an obligation to preserve humanity and to ensure mankind learns from the past to build a better future.

If one can manipulate “the people’s” view one can manipulate a government and a nation. People today are less informed despite having more information than ever before. They are less aware of things in plain sight. It is not Google’s fault; it is our fault for not forcing more competition and ensuring multiple sources of information always. We need multi-search engines to look at many data sources to give us always multi-options with scores of truths. Private companies will be driven by profits and payers will have more influence in which truth to tell. Governments could be doing so for non-profit until the truth conflicts with their political agenda. We need a way where government and non-profit team together across the globe with the sole purpose of preserving information.

Regardless of your political views, January 6, 2021, shows that “the truth” is merely the perception injected into the web. It has proven that one can influence the masses in believing in rhetoric. Conspiracies and other wild ideas are no longer difficult to magnify and we have seen governments toppled leveraging this new weapon of mass influence. If you are following the news today, you will see unrest across the globe. The first thing totalitarian governments do, when faced with an uprising, is to shut off the internet. Governments today fear social media as it can be the fire that lights up everyone and get them together while it can be a tool to manipulate the masses into believing the otherwise unbelievable. Social Media can also be a tool of hope, a message of truth, and a library of knowledge to enhance our understanding and teach us tolerance and acceptance! Social media has brought people together, opened dialogues, and helped us connect with people that we would have never known otherwise. It is not always negative, but it has also become more dangerous and the biggest influencer.

Lincoln also said “I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.”

Facts and Beer are encapsulated in Data and Entertainment. Unfortunately, facts can morph into “alternate facts”. Although beer never stopped nut has been morphing into other forms of mind inhibitors. This new beer has become the new addiction of nations. Today’s beer has morphed into clicking addiction and obsession with data streams, short tweets, short attention span, and data overload that erases short-term memory.

This is not about the good and evil of the social network it is about the black mirror that we need to ensure it does not become a reality at least in the nation where democracy was forged. Facts and beer will remain an essential part of keeping the truth alive.

We started with the idea of freedom and the notion of democracy. We abolished slavery and moved into a better system of government. We live in a society that empowers and encourages creativity. Hard work was a synonym for success and family values were the cornerstone of the fabric of our society. Acceptance, tolerance, freedom, and opportunities made us the ultimate destination for the birth of dreams and the burning fire of success. Today, we are giving away our freedom click by click for the sake of convenience and instant gratification. An app is never free, and neither is freedom.

If freedom is the result of democracy, widely and publicly educated citizenry is mandatory to sustain democracy. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816 “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Today, the Big Machine/ Big Brother is upon us, and if you want to see a glimpse of it look into China’s social credit system. This new dark reality is the birth of the worst-case scenario. Combining the government's watchful eyes with the corporate credit score is truly the death of freedom. Our choices are slipping away as we become marketing targets, potential consumers, and objects of manipulation.

What choice do I have when faced with Accept or Do Not Accept in every single app, every single service, and every single site. How many times have we installed an app and have we ever read the legal disclaimers?

I am merely a credit score in the eyes of financial institutions, a risk score in the eyes of the insurance industry, and a score in the KPI of my employer. I am now merely 123456 in many dashboards.

Amazon knows too much about my shopping habits and turned me into a Prime candidate for their AI engine where not only does it “help” me find what I need but suggests to me what I must have! It behaves on my behalf as if it knows me better than I do and scarily sometimes it does.

Google knows what I search for and wants to become the church of my thoughts and the refuge for my desires. If you combine both, you will create a digital persona of me and assign me a score based on what you need to measure at any given time. If today you prefer bald men, then I am in your grace but if tomorrow you want a generation of full headed guys, I become a reject in your dashboard.

The news outlets I watch influence my views. What I search for portrays my state of mind, and those little cookies I leave behind are the breadcrumbs that get recycled to make a mosaic representation of me, the man, the person, the subject, the object, and the target.

Government is no longer for the people when it judges its citizen's behavior as it wants them to become what it decides them to be. Their trustworthiness and value cannot become a mere score. The government of the people by some people is the true minority report movie from 2002. This tech-noir prediction is the black mirror of the credit score system. The movie shows that technology predicts your “intent” which is used to judge you. How different is that from giving you a score that shows where you are headed in the journey of a “good citizen”?

The internet of behavior (IoB) is an evolution of the Internet of things (IoT). Think of data mining on steroids, think of that movie “The Minority Report” starting with your behavior followed by being judged with what you could be doing or thinking of doing. Can we pass judgment on what we think you are thinking? IoB is a combination of things connected around you that will project, predict and assess you in a mathematical model. It will define you and will attempt to predict your behavior. This is about all the data streams about you and the insight into your behavior.

This interconnection of devices and interconnection of data from the various companies about you can tell you location, your searches, subscription, eating habits, religious preferences, who your friends are, your medical history, your financial status, marital status, sexual orientation, political views and much more!

Facial recognition and other biometric data are a critical part of this new paradigm. What is your behavior as it relates to COVID? Do you wear a mask or don’t you? Whom do you socialize with? Were you exposed to someone with COVID? Are you a mediocre citizen or a stellar one? Are you deemed to be responsible or irresponsible?

As a technologist, I believe there are many positive good applications and value to IoB. A tracing app is a wonderful tool if it stays only as a tracing app. Geofencing is a great application if I am to collect all media created within a radius of a terrorist attack to capture the perpetrator, and the network of security cameras is an amazing asset to assess traffic, congestion for better urban planning. My phone, however, should remain as MY phone and not someone's tool to monitor me, and my privacy should remain partially mine even if I am not skilled and knowledgeable in protecting myself from the technologies I advocate.

We often hear that Ignorance is not a defense. Ignorance is also the death of democracy. If we are to remain free, we must educate, advocate and protect those who cannot do for themselves. HIPPA, GDPR, and other regulatory compliance tools help provide some protection. We cannot regulate everything and cannot let capitalism run havoc with our values. We need to ensure that citizens are educated about their choices and users are educated about their acceptance. We also need to advocate for green minds as we advocate for green energy as the pollution of the souls is far-reaching than the pollution of the air. After all, we are the environment that is destroying all environments.

We are becoming slaves unwillingly and slowly adjusting as a lobster would in a pot as the temperature slowly rises. Many of us don’t know how to protect ourselves from ourselves. We need to educate and advocate for those who cannot. We need to protect those of us who have becomes slaves to our Internet of promises.

You may say, why worry about those who cannot think for themselves? You may say people are becoming digital slaves within their free will but remember what Lincoln said: “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free “