That we don't forget this!

Translated from Dutch. View the original post here

What was #BigData in 1941 exactly. Four and a half thousand names: there are many. The list wasn't printed out, it was typed old-fashioned. Somewhere in my head sounded the cheerful pling that typewriters made when they approached the end of the rule. Time to pull the lever and start the next line.

I was sitting in a beautiful style room in the City Archives and flipped another page of the list. 'Look, 'said the city archivist, 'this letter belongs to it.' The letter was dated 16 January 1941 and was auf Deutsch. The police commissioner of Amsterdam informed the Sicherheitspolizei that it had been a bigger job than expected, and of course there had been holidays and sick staff, but here was the section A to L of 'homosexuals, which appear in my administration. ' and that he would do his best to send the rest before the end of the week.

In't Hooge Nest, Roxane van Iperen writes: 'In Belgium, 30 percent of the community is deported to concentration camps. In France, 25%. The Netherlands removes 76 percent of its Jewish community within twenty-six months. ' So that was because of lists like this. The Netherlands had its administration in order. And on this list all known and alleged Amsterdam homosexuals were recorded, complete with their address.

Oh, Pling! - Caught. Oh, Pling! - Done. Oh, Pling! I was hiding. Oh, Pling!

Of course, these lists were never created for that purpose. But homosexual behaviour was prohibited, so whoever was convicted on that ground was obviously noted somewhere, and then it was also useful to keep track of who was suspected of such behavior, and yes, then of course you put all those names together, otherwise you could never find anyone. when it came to it.

So when the Germans wanted a copy, it was really just a matter of retyping everything nicely and looking up everyone's last known residential addresses in the municipal administration and adding them to it. (You can sincerely hope that the administrative staff left and right erased all kinds of names from the copy for the Sicherheitspolizei, or accidentally made mistakes in the oso business enumerations.)

The letter is now almost eighty years old. But we still make lists like that, including people who are only “suspected “of something, and nowadays we do that automated, with handy algorithms. I was pleased when the judge banned Syri last week: the importance of fraud detection did not outright the infringement of private life that the system committed.

Source: Karin Spaink

What exactly is Big Data in 2020?
More and more you hear that Big Data does not describe size, but a development. Namely, it contains two components. First of all, computer technology: the increasingly advanced hardware and software that makes it possible to collect, edit and store more data. The second component is the statistics that makes it possible to find meaning in a set of separate data.

The Tax Administration has violated the privacy of millions of Dutch people. This happened during experiments with Big Data, so television program Zembla discovered. The tax authorities are experimenting with our #persoonsgegevens (and that went well wrong). Not only the tax authorities but many companies abuse our personal data.