Big Social Data Will Be Used Against Us
This is not a fantasy: corporations will use social data analysis like that outlined in the scenario below to make decisions on hires. They will infer who has migraines, drinks too much, screws around, or is a closet socialist.
Facebook’s Generation Y nightmare - Frédéric Filloux
“Tina Porter, 26. She’s what you need for the transpacific trade issues you just mentioned, Alan. Her dissertation speaks for itself, she even learned Korean…”
He pauses.
“But?…” Asks the HR guy.
“She’s afflicted with acute migraine. It occurs at least a couple of times a month. She’s good at concealing it, but our data shows it could be a problem,” Chen says.
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Well, she falls into this particular Health Cluster. In her Facebook babbling, she sometimes refers to a spike in her olfactory sensitivity – a known precursor to a migraine crisis. In addition, each time, for a period of several days, we see a slight drop in the number of words she uses in her posts, her vocabulary shrinks a bit, and her tweets, usually sharp, become less frequent and more nebulous. That’s an obvious pattern for people suffering from serious migraine. In addition, the Zeo Sleeping Manager website and the stress management site HeartMath – both now connected with Facebook – suggest she suffers from insomnia. In other words, Alan, we think you can’t take Ms Porter in the firm. Our Predictive Workforce Expenditure Model shows that she will cost you at least 15% more in lost productivity. Not to mention the patterns in her Facebook entries suggesting a 75% chance for her to become pregnant in the next 18 months, again according to our models.”
“Not exactly a disease from what I know. But OK, let’s move on”.
Corporations will conceal their decision-making processes when it collides with privacy regulations and government restrictions on discrimination, most likely by outsourcing head-hunting to outside companies, who will outsource finding the best candidates to other outside companies, who will use programs rented from even more outside companies. They are doing this already: this is mainstream.
