The Hank Show: How We Lost Our Privacy

I was born in 1961, so a little more than half of my life was pre-internet (for me, the internet really began in 1995, when a new piece of software called Netscape was introduced). I remember how amazing email was before spammers got going, how fun the early “world-wide web” was, and how interesting and informative various bloggers were before Facebook, Twitter, and Google showed up and took over. There weren’t adblockers in the late 90s, because there weren’t many ads. I remember how furious we websurfers got when it was revealed that websites had these things called “cookies” that were sent to your browser, so they could track your history. What an invasion of privacy!

Those concerns seem quaint now. My daughter was born in 1994, and she has really not known any time when she couldn’t go online. She also knows that she has no privacy, and she goes on the internet with the expectation that everything she emails, posts on social media, and buys is seen and logged by someone or something. McKenzie Funk’s book, The Hank Show, is a biography of the man he holds responsible for first exploiting the financial potential of Big Data.

“Hank” is Hank Asher, a brilliant yet very troubled man. He was born in 1951 on a farm in Indiana. His father was an abusive alcoholic. Hank early on showed signs of genius: he dropped out of high school, and

He applied for work at a local factory and scored so high on its basic employment test that his new bosses asked him to the more difficult draftsman’s test. He taught himself trigonometry in a week and aced that test, too.
(p. 25)

He worked for a house painting company in Ft. Lauderdale, and he soon figured out to streamline the process so that his crew could paint a house or condo tower in less time than any other. He started his own company, Asher Painting, and it soon became the largest painting company in Florida. He got his pilot’s license and bought an Aerostar. He sold the painting company, and decided to smuggle pot out of Belize. (I’m not making this up.)

Asher saw a computer demonstrated in an IBM showroom, and was immediately attracted to its potential. His overarching talent was his ability to find patterns in huge sets of data, and he immediately saw how a computer could help him. At the time the problem with crunching large amounts of data was in the basic design of computers: they had to take a piece of data in the computer’s memory, send it to the central processing unit (CPU), perform calculations on it, and then send it back to memory for output. Computer scientists were trying to speed up the process by increasing the CPU speed, but there was a bottleneck in passing the data back and forth. Asher’s insight was to set up many processors running in parallel so that the time spent sending data to and from memory was drastically reduced.

Once he had his computing system set up, he needed to feed it data. He knew that drivers license data was publicly available in Florida, so he negotiated a sweet deal to access ALL of it. He also acquired car insurance histories, home and business addresses, employment histories. Armed with all this, he started his first company, Database Technologies, in the early 90s. He quickly realized he could compile a fairly accurate profile of an individual, and he offered his company’s products to law enforcement for practically nothing. (By this time, he was out of the smuggling business, and he devoted the rest of his life to helping LE track down child predators, terrorists, etc.)

Throughout all of this, Asher showed signs on instability, berating employees mercilessly and then turning around displaying enormous generosity. He sold Database Technologies and started another successful data mining project, Seisint. Once again, though, his erratic behavior prevented him from being a good manager, and the board bought him out. He drank heavily and had many girlfriends whom he took to his various estates in the Caribbean and the US.

He ended up dying in his sleep in 2013. By then, his database included all of the data in the credit agencies Experian, Equifax, and Transunion. He also worked on developing facial recognition, using photos from drivers licenses. He was the first to illustrate to companies how valuable user data is. Thanks to him, practically every move we make is tracked, every purchase we make is logged, and every website we visit is noted (as well as how long we stay there).

Funk closes the book with some horror stories of innocent people getting arrested for crimes they never committed, due to imperfect facial recognition. One man, a veteran and security guard, spent years trying to clear his name. He lost his job and was bankrupted.

Communist China’s “Social Credit Score” system is well known – it tracks what kinds of things its citizens read, if they pay their bills promptly, and who their friends are. If a person is associated with the “wrong kind” of people, he will find difficulty placing train or airplane reservations, buying a car, and completing other basic tasks. Funk makes a good case that, while we do not live in social ranking system as overt as China’s, we’re pretty close. The Hank Show  is a warning that as we give up more and more personal data in exchange for “free” services from Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other megacorporations, we put our freedom in peril.

Teaching Coding, Part 3

Our second day of class was a lot of fun; the students shared the games that they coded. You can click on each screenshot to go to the actual game. Some of them are quite challenging!

Emily’s Game

Lucy’s Game:

Caroline’s Game:

Allison’s game:

Delaney’s game:

The day’s new material involved using the pen feature in Scratch to draw figures. We coded a program that drew a triangle everywhere you clicked your mouse. We wrote a function, Draw a Triangle, that the program called up whenever the user clicked the mouse. We also learned how to create new variables. Click the screenshot below to go to the program. You can click the “See Inside” button to look at the code.

Teaching Coding, Part 1

My school has a three-week period between semesters called Winterim, where we offer an alternative curriculum. This year, I am taking the plunge and teaching an intro to computer coding. One of the biggest challenges of teaching at an all-girls school is sparking interest in computer science among my students. Hopefully, this minicourse will get a few girls inspired to pursue the subject further, and we can build on that. So, I’ll be writing a series of posts in the next couple of weeks to share with you what works and what doesn’t.

The basic course outline is this:

1. Intro to coding through Scratch. (The screenshot above is from the Scratch programming environment.)
2. Intro to Python by designing some simple games. For this part, I’m using Al Sweigart’s Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. It’s available for free online here.
3. Design your own Android apps. I’m using MIT’s App Inventor website in conjunction with the book App Inventor to do this. You need a Google account to log into the website.
4. Time permitting, we’ll learn the basics of TinkerCAD, and print out some 3D projects.

I’ve spent the past couple of days exploring Scratch, and that will be the subject of my next post.

Entering The World of Coding

Women are underrepresented in computer science, so I have agreed to offer a three-week minicourse on coding at Harpeth Hall during Winterim, a between-semesters period for alternative curricula. My only previous experience with computer programming is from more than 30 years ago, when I had to take a course in FORTRAN for my engineering degree. I do not have happy memories of that experience.

Fortunately, there are many more coding languages to choose from these days, and there are some very entertaining and enjoyable ways to learn them. I’m learning Python, and I’m using two resources. The first one is the book Hello World! by Warren and Carter Sande.

It’s written at a level schoolkids can understand, but adults will also find it very helpful. It’s filled with useful illustrations, and best of all, it has a link to a downloadable file that installs a Python IDLE (a graphical user interface that allows you to write and run Python programs on your computer), so you can work through all the examples as you read. There is a brand new edition coming out in two weeks, and the link above will take you to the Amazon page for that edition.

Here’s a screenshot of one of the first exercises. It’s a program that converts any Fahrenheit temperature to Celsius:

The second resource I’m using is Codecademy, which hosts all kinds of online courses for people who want to learn coding. Here’s a screenshot of a typical lesson:

The lessons are easy, entertaining, and you can learn at your own pace. Codecademy offers courses in jQuery, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. And guess what? It’s free!

I’ll be posting later in the year on how the course goes, and what my students think about the subject. Meanwhile, here is a nice introduction to what is involved in programming.