Data mining, reliability and disinformation:
Nowadays data mining is used by most marketing research, cold calling and business intelligence firms. This enables the firm to capture any specific information that has been published on the internet (like social networking sites or blogs, etc) or even through other sources (like personal contacts, insider trading, etc). This can be very detrimental to some organizations that are flat, because of the ease of information availability (and most orgs are becoming flat nowadays).
Reliability plays another important role in information gathering. How reliable is information that is available (sometimes freely). How do I know what to use and what not to? If I am a spying firm how do I know if the information I have is exactly what my rival want me to have? Am I getting too paranoid due to the disinformation? These are questions which might not have any concrete answers and as a spying firm I can never be so sure. The soviets used disinformation quite frequently during the cold war days. And it can set the benchmark for firms distributing disinformation through easily accessible forums.
Technologies in 2020 might be so advanced that we might all end up being spied on everything that we do and say in the public and maybe even in privacy (like in the good old days of the former East Germany, when there were supposed to have been atleast 1 informant for every 6 people). I would like to point out an article published in the UK which says that fingerprinting is done to replace ID cards. I can imagine a world where everyone is fingerprinted and tagged, it would be a world where all information is literally at one’s fingertips :). An organization can find out everything about its employees (whom they are friends, with whom they date, who they talk to, etc. Who knows, there might be no need to carry your credit cards anymore or even better a world without money, everything is available at your fingertips) and it might get to a point that the organizations are not competing for customers anymore; they are all competing for information.
Lastly I would like to narrate a satire: In 2020 a call is made to the Pizza Hut in Janhallee (Leipzig) for an order of 100 pizzas to Nordstrasse12. Now the telephone operator of this Pizza Hut secretly sells this information to the Pizza Hut in Waldstrasse, now the Waldstrasse Hut hurries up and beats the Janhallee one in delivering the pizzas to the address, but unfortunately there is no such address as Nordstrasse12 – a classic case of deception and disinformation by the Janhallees).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_trading
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/09/19/corporate_spying_in_spotlight/ http://ezinearticles.com/?Working-in-FLAT-Organizations:-An-Idiots-Guide&id=124671 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_v38/ai_4373956/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/22/fingerprinting_of_uk_school_kids/
Deepak.
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In 2020, all communications between Pizza Huts (and everywhere else) will be monitored by the Stadt Polizei, so the perpetrators will be arrested and stripped of their identities! Seriously, will the SNs of the future foster or perhaps protect people from Total Information Awareness?
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