“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘they’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘my phone is spying on me.”
Philip k. Dick

Phillip dick was so right when he said these words.
Recently i read a story about a man named matt in the east coast of united states who claimed that facebook somehow figured out his very deep personal secrets even before he shared those with anybody else including his family.  Read the story here. Tracking your personal data and popping up related ads is nothing new. The little cookies left on your computer by websites were used for this purpose. However, what scares me is that this has gone to a completely new level now. It’s no more as simple as deleting the cookies and getting rid of the hack.
What is backing this silent upsurge hunger towards your personal attributes and behaviour is a massive technology referred to as “big data”. Large corporations with heavy computing muscles - facebook, google, amazon and numerous other faceless ones as well - have built the capabilities of tracking every little aspect of what you do – not only in the virtual world, but also in physical world – and then run complex intelligent algorithms to figure out your deep rooted secrets.
In matt’s example, he commented twice on an article regarding “equality in marriage” on a website that was powered by facebook open graph apis. The website provided the facility to comment on its articles using facebook’s infrastructure. As a result facebook algorithms picked up those comments and presented matt with those recommendations concluding that matt was a gay. There are examples where the large retail stores in the us – like target, wal-mart, etc – track your “check outs” and derive a pattern about your preferences, likings and developments in personal life.
There are three very important observations that are very relevant from this example

• Matt’s behaviour was tracked from a normal website and not directly from facebook. The website used facebook apis and that’s how the comments reached mr. Zuckerberg
• The algorithms are now so sophisticated that they can identify very indirect relationships between two not so related things – something a human bran may also miss
• The data and its analysis is out there with the big giants. Its no more on your own computer like the good old cookies which you could clean up and get rid of them. Matt will never ever be able to erase the impression facebook has made about him.

Scary? Yeap.
Big data is here to stay and the pirates of the internet sea are equipped with huge engineering muscles and whether you like it or not, they know enough about you. Is there a way to hide? Well, the only option is to exercise little caution while in the virtual world. Think twice before liking a page, putting a comment and clicking on “plus 1”. Ask yourself whether it is really required? Are you ok if this is made available to everyone in the world? Most importantly to the most genius algorithm written by the best minds in the technology world?  If the answer is “yes”, you are safe.

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Woman's Day Special - Salute to the real heroes Amol Mategaonkar9:48 AM 0 comments

International Woman's Day. Its everywhere. Its all over on Twitter, Facebook walls, News Papers, TV Channels, WhatsApp, the good old SMSs, emails and so on. Recognizing outstanding achievements of extraordinary women is in the air. I wonder why we need a special day to do this. However amidst this trending topic of the day, I have been thinking about two ladies, who I feel deserve a mention. Both of them represent real heroes and a true spirit of what a woman stands for in our society. 

These two women are the domestic help that we have in our home. Nanda - a maid who does daily chores of cleaning, washing, dusting etc. And Kalpana- who cooks food for us. They deserve a mention not only because - they are excellent in their work, they are committed, trust worthy, take care of our kids like their own and have become part of our families since last 6 yrs - but because of their concealed mission. A mission to make their children educated, even though they themselves are hardly.

Both of them have seen extreme situations in life. Stayed in environments that we have only imagined and seen in Slum Dog Millionaires of the world. Have worked an average of 15 hrs a day, 7 days a week, from the age of 14 and still continue to do so after 3 or 4 decades. Their stories give goose bump to me even now. In such extreme situations, more often than not, it is so easy to take a short cut; get children earn some quick money by making them work. There are enough local shops, garages, restaurants, etc. ready to employ child labor in a city like Mumbai. Still, these two ladies, determined to educate their next generation, continued going through the grind that the life had put them though and came out with flying colors.

Children of both of these terrific women have either completed their graduation or are in the process of doing so. The life time efforts of these ladies have started to pay off. The graduate children have got decently paying permanent jobs in reputed companies. More importantly, the ladies did not differentiate between their sons and daughters and educated their daughters as well, passing on the mantle to them.

I can see tremendous sense of achievement each time they share the exam results of their children. Many times, they don’t even recollect and pronounce correctly the subjects their kid just cleared. But the sense of satisfaction abounds their faces. My guess is that the reason for their satisfaction is not only that their children achieved something they couldn't in life, or that their lifetime effort has paid off, but simply the fact that their next gen will not go through the same drudgery they had to go through in their life.

It is so true. Nanda and Kalpana are the examples of how a woman can make a difference to her family, if she is determined. The tremendous zeal within a woman can make her achieve impossible missions in spite of all the odds.

These two women are real heroes in their own life. I hope our society has many more Kalpanas and Nandas like these. My salute to these wonderful women.

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