New Technologies Always Followed by New Concerns: The Debate Over Big Data

A March 23 article in the New York Times highlights debate over new technologies placed under the "banner" of "Big Data" and concerns over individuals' privacy. 

Big Data may have renewed the debate over privacy, but the article points out that as the government transitioned much of its data, including tax returns and credit information into databases on mainframe computers in the 1960s, many citizens raised similar privacy concerns.

“It really freaked people out,” said Daniel J. Weitzner, a former senior Internet policy official in the Obama administration. “The people who cared about privacy [in the 1960s] were every bit as worried as we are now.”

But along with the fears, came many technology developments that we rely upon and praise today. Will the same be true with Big Data? This is a question we have been beginning to discuss in class. Certainly  we have agreed it can be beneficial to retailers and those extending lines of credit to consumers. According to the Times piece, the Big Data umbrella has includes the ability to collect "data including Web pages, browsing habits, sensor signals, smartphone location trails and genomic information, combined with clever software to make sense of it all."

Proponents of this data collection say it is allowing for us to see and measure things we have never been able to before. Although, as others in the class have pointed out, methodologies of these studies using certain data, like Google searches to predict flu statistics, have been called into question.

But Alex Pentland, computational social scientist and director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the M.I.T. told the Times, "This data is a new asset. You want it to be liquid and used." He believes the future will be data driven and will surpass any vision George Orwell had.

Many government officials and corporate officers, however, appear to be more hesitant to make statements like Pentland. The World Economic Forum, made up of a wide coalition, released a report last month that recommends more restrictions with data and giving consumers more control over their information.

“There’s no bad data, only bad uses of data,” Craig Mundie, a senior adviser at Microsoft, who worked on the position paper, told the Times.

Corporate members of the group members of the group said they will have to address some of the privacy concerns in order to keep the most useful data available to companies.

As we have discussed in class, it appears this debate is in its beginning stages and time will tell how policy will be shaped in this area.