Link Banana

Thomas Goetz’s profile of PatientsLikeMe has gotten a fair amount of attention on the blogs today. It’s a pretty interesting profile of a rather interesting site.

One afternoon in late November when I visited the office, Jamie turned to a nearby whiteboard and traced out an x-y axis, slashing a descending line from left to right. “We have the ability to run a probability engine,” he said. “We can mathematically model each patient. We can tell them what’s going to happen in their life. We can tell you when you’ll need a wheelchair.” He made a mark along the line. “And we can even tell you the day you’ll die, with remarkable certainty.”

Though most VoIP operators have now built in a way for authorities to monitor your calls, there’s still no good way for authorities to get into Skype. Whether this is a great thing or a troubling prospect probably depends on your feelings about privacy and your fear of terrorism.

As with other internet technologies and real-world rules, the authorities will probably always be behind in their bid to eavesdrop on criminals, and the legitimate desire for privacy and security will continue to come into conflict with the needs of law enforcement. So far, evidence from intercepted VoIP calls has not been used in court; e-mails are often presented as evidence, but they are easily retrieved direct from the hard disks of the sender or receiver, or from corporate back-up tapes, rather than being intercepted in transit. But once intercepted traffic is presented as evidence, it is sure to reignite the debate over civil liberties and internet wiretapping.

Think that the only monitoring of your call to customer support is that it “may be recorded?” The Economist says that may not be the case.

Aneesh Nair, head of the Academia, a call-centre training school in Bangalore, says context data may also include information gleaned from news reports. Storms, sporting events and transport strikes, for example, can affect callers’ moods and purchasing dispositions, he says, and can be used to provide tips to agents. “Demographic mapping” features provide additional information about the products callers are most likely to buy based upon their location, time of call, and whether they are calling from a land-line or a mobile phone.

The next step, beyond analysing the context around a call, is to examine the call itself, using “word spotting” software to evaluate the performance of the agent and the reaction of the caller. There is strong demand for quality-control software, says Donna Fluss of DMG Consulting, a specialist consultancy based in West Orange, New Jersey, because call-centre managers are only able to listen to a few calls per agent each month. Word-spotting software allows managers to monitor agents much more closely.

Soundly quite nearly Orwellian. Am I the only one to think so? (Comments are open.)

Catherine Price sets out to hide in plain sight for an entire week and found it far harder than you might think.

He laid out my basic tasks: Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes. Get a confetti-cut paper shredder for sensitive documents and junk mail. Sign up for the national do-not-call registry (ignoring, if you can, the irony of revealing your phone number and e-mail address to prevent people from contacting you), and opt out of prescreened credit offers. Don’t buy a plane ticket, rent a car, get married, have a baby, purchase land, start a business, go to a casino, use a supermarket loyalty card, or buy nasal decongestant. By the time I left Hoofnagle’s office, a week was beginning to sound like a very long time.

(via brijit)