For all of the hubbub over the NSA snooping scandal, Kieran Healy explains what all that hubbub is about… 18th century style.
You can see here that Mr Appleton and Mr John Adams were connected through both being a member of one group, while Mr John Adams and Mr Samuel Adams shared memberships in two of our seven groups. Mr Ash, meanwhile, was not connected through organization membership to any of the first four men on our list. The rest of the table stretches out in both directions.
Notice again, I beg you, what we did there. We did not start with a “social networke” as you might ordinarily think of it, where individuals are connected to other individuals. We started with a list of memberships in various organizations. But now suddenly we do have a social networke of individuals, where a tie is defined by co-membership in an organization. This is a powerful trick.
Keep in mind that this is precisely one layer of metadata. Private marketers can literally overlap hundreds of these bad boys — credit cards, membership cards, magazine subscriptions, Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Bass Pro Shops and Home Depot.
You leave bread crumbs everywhere. And when government really wants to dive in, guess who they call?
Well… you signed the EULA, right? How do you think Facebook and Google sell for billions of dollars in their IPOs?
No scandal. Just about 300 million people waking up at once.
