As the digital age approaches adolescence, it is already possible to capture, store and analyse data on a planetwide scale. Triangulation of data beyond all historical human capacity is boosting predictive analytics, trends mapping and decision foresight.
The immense concentration of this data gathering ability is paralysing in terms of implications. The biggest generators of data are also its biggest purchasers viz Facebook, Amazon, Google.
Data richness of these behemoths is an unbeatable competitive advantage. At the other end, there are small firms using data analysis, disrupting and upending the status quo. It is possible, thanks to licensable data and affordable largescale crunching via cloud computing. Licensors of proprietary data share the profits, making it a win-win.
The subject of control is maligned as a Luddite position but is potentially a catastrophic reality. Alarms are raised frequently, but rarely does any regulatory or institutional solution get proposed. There are several valid fears getting swept in the broad current: Whether data driven decisions will disenfranchise human authority. And if a data adaptive algorithm will
regulate our affairs. If a set of servers already know more about each of us, than we do about ourselves. That privacy will cease to exist and that our sense of self will potentially be a few clicks away from surrender to a hacker.
When one imagines the data that 200 crore Facebook users allow access to, the very same birthday reminders and party pics may become the means of obsessive algorithmic manipulation. The wider and more diverse the inputs, the richer the possibility of total clarity. Diverse data inputs give incremental predictive power. It is not about informed consent alone. It’s the sheer inescapability of digital surveillance and its monetised exploitation. Mobile phones are tracking devices. That’s was the original inventive inspiration.
Even more frightening is the comprehensive takeover of common culture. The nature, depth and consequential impact are not articulated often enough. It is not only about how public discourse shall be influenced. It is the answer to a question as fundamental as ‘Who am I?’.
Our lives, purpose, education, exposure, media and democracy all are subject to irreversible redefinition.
The data oligopoly is about domination. Its cultural derivative is fundamentally about power. To achieve and maintain the power to construct, define and validate reality itself.
Today the internet majors are intimately aware of the most profound and mundane aspects of our private and public lives in real time: our tragedies, anxieties, heartbreaks and elations.
In summation, they know current and emerging social trends and hot buttons, in itself, a source of immense commercial value and culture shaping power. They can influence our shared sense of ‘us’.
Someone commercially motivated can edict our collective judgement and dictate civic virtuosity and notion of collective welfare. Politicians, editorial elites, academics, intellectuals be damned, along with their organic, historic continuity and sense of entitlement.
In services, products and hybrid domains, it creates entirely new areas of definition. What, for example, is the culpability in the case of a decision made by a machine? Who is in charge of the ‘Auto mode’? Will life become a predictive report and will I know of the diseases I will suffer from? Which investments I ought to make, what my imminent future will be – all pieced together from a gazillion bits of incontrovertible data?
As I write, Cambridge Analytica, the political data analysis firm with ties to President Trump’s 2016 campaign, suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix, over alleged manipulation of private information pertaining to 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica was hardly a stealth operator. Founded by Stephen K Bannon and Robert Mercer, key Republican figures, it had insider status and claimed a key role in winning the election for President Trump. Its gold was psychographic profiles of individuals, influenced to vote in a peculiarly persuasive manner.
Be it a political brand, product or service, the consumer reality may be constructed in such a manner that your choice is their choice made for you.
Each day billions of user agreements, each of epic proportions, filled with verbiage are check marked ‘I agree’ with scant recognition of the power thus ceded.
In the history of civilization, such an asymmetry of power and lack of reciprocity has never been witnessed. An agreement that your data will not be used for Z purpose is no solace: it doesn’t preclude it being used for Z1- to -Zn, all later emerging possibilities.
Your incomprehension is the key link in the value chain. Data generating encounters are happening across the digital savannah. No one exclusion can save you. Moreover, it is not about raw data specifics but the possibilities therefrom. Your degrees of freedom are virtual, pun intended!
The comfortable world of ‘ idea-hypothesis – research validation’ will be blown to smithereens. Everyone and everything is updated every instant. Likewise, time depreciation of data will never make it irrelevant.
Have you asked why the big in big data is never quantified? No small is too small as a data point and no big is too big. This is because each bit adds to the previous stack, making the data owner omniscient.