How are we doing so far?

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Now that we're into the third week of the new year, it is clear that there's no going back.  That first week, it really feels as though we're still in 2013, but by now, all hope is lost.  We're committed to moving into 2014, a full quarter of the way into President Obama's second term.

While the onslaught of Republican propaganda against the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare") is beginning to falter, and significant numbers of people are buying health insurance using the government insurance clearinghouses and websites, the fake problems that conservatives manufactured are being replaced by a few real problems that people are discovering.  Most of these are with the programming of the infamous websites that were intended to connect people with insurance plans.

Insurance is a screwy business, as we have learned over the last few centuries.  If an insurance company fails to deliver, the client is forced to go to court, or to eat the denial and be quiet.  For all our supposed litigious tendencies as a society, people in the social stratus which I personally inhabit are more likely to take a denial of coverage of a particular service with resignation than to pursue the possibility of suing the insurance provider.  As the number of clients increase, we might see the number of denials of service increase as well, and then things are going to get interesting (especially with a particularly virulent virus vaiting in the vings.  I mean, wings.)  With almost universal participation, insurance companies are going to have to re-think just how much profit-taking there is going to be.

With underemployment firmly established in most states, it is an employer's market in the world of business.  The usual thought-habits of "College degree =  job" are going to die hard, and when they do, we will have a falling-off of people going to college, further encouraged by unconscionable increases in school fees, but there will be an enormous population of unemployed angry college graduates glaring balefully at world.  The Republican Party will have to do some fancy footwork to direct their hostility away from business and industry towards the government and the Democratic Party.

On a completely unrelated subject, it is becoming an exercise in frustration to try to do the things one used to do fairly easily on computers and the Internet.  Android-based systems seemed to offer so much initially, but every developer seems to become increasingly adept at making the user pay in terms of obligatory advertisement viewing, or surrendering of personal information.  Be careful about giving your e-mail address and passwords to sites.  Only a few big sites have the capability to protect your privacy; most sites can be easily hacked by practically anyone, and are less likely to announce that a security breach has taken place.  Some of the larger sites are also vulnerable, perhaps because they haven't taken customer security seriously enough.  I subscribed to a software service from Adobe Inc, but was told recently that their customer data was recently stolen by an unknown party.  They advised me to use the services of a credit agency to monitor my credit, and offered to pay for it.  It is almost inevitable that Google and Facebook will be hacked, and if anyone has established an account with them, they could be in trouble someday.

Talking about Google and Facebook, their advertising is becoming increasingly intrusive on a standard computer, and almost oppressively so on a tablet or phone.  Neither company ever claimed to exist for the sake of their ordinary users; they exist on behalf of their customers, that is, the companies who hire Google and Facebook to advertise for them, and do marketing analysis for them.  So Google sends user profiles to all those who would like to pay for their analyses.  If you ever click on the website of a Google client (such as Barnes and Noble, say, just to give you an idea of a company that might be clients of Google), for a fee, a list of all sites that you have browsed to will be made available to B & N.  This is disconcerting for anyone who might have Internet destinations that they do not care to have disclosed!

Even more disconcerting is that software can correlate users who browse to one category of website, Category A, say, and who also browse to another category of website, say Category B. Very little can be done with this sort of correlation for most of us, but the potential for abuse of this information is setting off red flags among those who are concerned about civil liberties.

The practical fact is that a business which has access to this sort of information today is probably not in a position to capitalize on it except in the most rudimentary way.  But I can see a class of consultant arising who will offer their services for the right price, to market highly targeted goods to Internet users.

Let's see.  Looking through the ads on the side of my Facebook page, I see
* An ad for Piano Teachers Wanted.  (Someone has noticed that I write about music.)
* An offer to subscribe to the New Yorker.  (I should never have clicked on the link about New Yorker cartoons!)
* A Buddha Bowl Sale.  (One of my Facebook buddies is avidly interested in matters related to Buddhism.  Ironically, the Buddha Bowls have nothing much to do with the religion.)
* Hillary Clinton.  (Perhaps a connection has been made between this Blog and my facebook page.)
*  Get your students more success in mathematics!  (Oh dear.)

So far, it's all pretty innocuous.  But you can easily see how it can get pretty uncomfortable pretty soon.  As long as some mindless computer makes the decision what ads to send my way, I don't really care.  But if a human were to be looking at all this summary data, I would want to get off of facebook in a hurry, and Google, too.

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