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tech.com
Tech-Op-ed May, 2019 SOUNDING OFF
By Michael Skinner Editor
sonal information from search results, purchase histories, publicly available government records, social media activity, and many other sources, and sells it. These companies analyze and classify huge swathes of data, which can be used by their customers to target consumers with advertisements, assess the riskiness of each individual’s lifestyle or determine their eligibility for a new job. The problem is that this enormous amount of data collection and trading
I am a Commodity I
has been going on behind the scenes, without any direct relationship between the broker and the subjects of these detailed profiles. Consumers in the U.S. have little to no power over the breadth of data collected, its longevity or how it is traded. However, new regulation is finally in sight. In a landmark piece of legislation that went into effect in February, Ver-
mont has become the first state in the country to pass a law requiring busi- nesses that collect and sell residents’ data to register as data brokers. As of March this year, 121 companies had registered. While the law doesn’t require brokers to provide an opt-out of data collection — or to specify what they col- lect, about whom, and who buys it — it does require them to make it easy for a consumer to find opt-out policies, provided they have one. These 121 companies make up a motley crew, including ZoomInfo and
White Pages, two people-search services, Equifax and Experian, the credit re- porting agencies, and Acxiom, Oracle and Innovis, which are some of the largest names in advertising and marketing. Acxiom, for example, compiles up to 3,000 attributes to build a personal
profile that it provides to customers. This profile includes age, gender, educa- tion, employment, 45 years of historical name changes and residential infor- mation, the number of purchases made with a credit card in the previous 24 months, religion, health interests, political views, relationship status, and number of children, to name only a few. This information is then used to infer more attributes, such as whether
a couple is planning to have a baby or adopt a child, if somebody is likely to file taxes in April, further details about the person’s home, including number of bedrooms, and if they are more of a social “influencer” or more socially “in- fluenced.” Two of the most prominent figures in tech recently addressed the issue
of consumer data protection in separate op-eds, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. From Cook’s point of view, individuals should have much more control over the data that companies collect, how it is stored, and if it will be sold. He believes the Federal Trade Commission should create a clearinghouse that requires all data brokers to be registered, an ex- panded version of Vermont’s recent regulation. “Consumers shouldn’t have to tolerate another year of companies irre-
sponsibly amassing huge user profiles, data breaches that seem out of control and the vanishing ability to control our own digital lives,” wrote Cook in Time, in January. In the Washington Post Zuckerberg argued that “Effective privacy and
data protection needs a globally harmonized framework,” in support of ex- panding the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation into the United States. The GDPR includes provisions for consumers to obtain copies of their data from businesses, as well as the right to be forgotten, known as Data Erasure. These comments instantly came under fire as “self-serving,” as a way
for each of these tech giants to hedge their bets and be in control of policy as it develops, rather than suffer with their competitors. Regardless, it seems obvious that some regulation is necessary, no matter who brings up the dis- cussion. In some ways it could be better that tech companies have a hand in de-
veloping policy, rather than leaving it to an uninformed and inexperienced federal or state committee. On the other hand, it appears that “some restric- tions apply” already, if only one lives in the EU. r
f you are one of the 3.2 billion people on Earth that use the internet, you are both a consumer and a product. Over the last few years, the term “da- ta broker” has come to define a type of business that scoops up users’ per-
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
By Jacob Fattal Publisher
No Moore: The End of a Law
wrote an internal paper that predicted that the number of components on a chip would double every year until 1975. In 1975, at an IEEE International Electron Devices meeting, Moore revised his prediction to a doubling every two years, due to changes in photolithography, the size of wafers and what he termed “circuit and device cleverness.” “Moore’s Law,” as it was labeled by Caltech professor Carver Mead, has
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continued to progress on track. Recently, however, experts have predicted that once commercial chip features shrink to around five nanometers in 2020, the investment in R&D and new process technology may be too great to justi- fy going any further. Another problem is that at this scale, quantum physics comes into play and the behavior of electrons becomes somewhat unpre- dictable. Electrons “tunnel” through transistors’ gate oxide layers, making it difficult to control their on and off states. For years, we have been speculating about the future after Moore’s Law.
Peter Lee, vice president of AI and research at Microsoft once quipped, “There’s a law about Moore’s Law; the number of people predicting the death of Moore’s Law doubles every two years.” Multigate and tri-gate transistor models have been developed to help extend the life of the law, as well as mul- tiprocessor and multicore systems, but fundamentally new types of computing are required. Currently, quantum computing is being explored as a solution by compa-
nies that include IBM, Google, Rigetti Computing, and Intel, among many others. Quantum computers use quantum bits, typically electrons or photons, to represent combinations of 1 and 0 through the phenomenon of superposi- tion. Other possibilities include optical communication, using light rather than electricity to communicate inside a chip, and neuromorphic computing, a concept developed by Mead that attempts to model computing systems on the neurons in the human brain. It is likely that we will see a range of new types of chips that are special-
ized for different tasks, such as machine vision and cloud computing. This was- n’t as necessary when conventional micro- processors were advancing regularly, offer- ing reliable increases in speed. Now, as Moore’s Law winds down, flexibility will have to make up the difference. r
or decades, Gordon Moore’s prediction that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years, has held true. In 1965, Moore, then the director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor,
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