Everything about everybody, living or dead, is known in near real-time.
We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases.
Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every single person has been unqiuely identified. Easy to do thru process of elimination with that much data.
When shown my own data set, everything about me was right there. Everywhere I've ever lived, worked. My entire legal trail, like mortgages, marriage. Seisent even inferred my ex-wife's affair (FOAF).
Seisent sold their tech (big graph database, query language, some gear) to the NSA. Who was able to add non-public data. Like phone records, electronic transactions, etc.
That was 10+ years ago. Now I imagine they're slurping data up globally.
I really doubt this is true, given how poorly targeted advertising performs, how much stuff credit-reporting agencies get wrong, and how much stuff intelligence services miss.
I'm sure they have a lot of data, but like anyone else, it's dirty data, and it's difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from it.
PS- One of Seisent's selling points was helping to solve cold cases. The successful example I remember was matching MOs from a set of crimes in multiple areas and then identifying all the persons matching the profile who could also be in those areas at those times.
How about a single targeted advert for a product I want to buy? (Note: products I already bought and then start seeing tons of advertisements for don't count)
> PS- One of Seisent's selling points was helping to solve cold cases.
Did it actually help solve those cases? I haven't heard of any dramatic drops in unsolved murders, or huge numbers of cold cases being closed.
If they really do "effectively know everything about everybody", they're keeping damn quiet about it.
We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases.
Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every single person has been unqiuely identified. Easy to do thru process of elimination with that much data.
When shown my own data set, everything about me was right there. Everywhere I've ever lived, worked. My entire legal trail, like mortgages, marriage. Seisent even inferred my ex-wife's affair (FOAF).
Seisent sold their tech (big graph database, query language, some gear) to the NSA. Who was able to add non-public data. Like phone records, electronic transactions, etc.
That was 10+ years ago. Now I imagine they're slurping data up globally.
Siesent, Palantir, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc effectively know everything about everybody.
I assume foreign efforts are doing the same.