Three years ago, in a May 2015 Wall Street Journal article entitled Tracing Some of Big Data’s Big Paradoxes, I quoted Washington University in St. Louis Law Professor Neil M. Richards in summing up the opportunities and challenges represented by Big Data, “Big Data will create winners and losers, and it is likely to benefit the institutions who wield its tools over the individuals being mined, analyzed, and sorted.”
Now, nearly three years later, the dark side of Big Data is dominating the headlines, and we can’t say that we weren’t warned. The Monday April 23 edition of The Wall Street Journal carries a book review by Gregg Easterbrook entitled Big Data, Big Problems. The review begins: “‘Big Data” is the Big Bad of our moment. Companies and governments amass enormous troves of information about our online and offline activities, so they can understand them better than we do. Recently we learned that creepy firms like Cambridge Analytica mine Big Data from websites such as Facebook. Facebook itself seems increasingly creepy, grounded in lying to the public about what happens to the data it collects”. So here we are three years later.
How did Big Data go from promise of the future to “Big Bad Data”? Professor Richards hinted at the dark side of Big Data back in 2015 when he noted, “Big Data promises to use data to make the world transparent, buts its collection is invisible, and its tools and techniques are opaque, shrouded by layers of physical, legal, and technical privacy by design”. Now in 2018, we have this view from Gregg Easterbrook: “In the future, will Big Data help physicians cure diseases or help health insurers deny claims? Make factories and products safer or accelerate layoffs? Ultimately spawn some kind of hostile artificial intelligence? Right now it’s fair to suppose that many people would favor putting the Big Data genie back into the bottle”.
Cautionary warnings about the perils of Big Data have now become omnipresent. The latest issue of The New York Review of Books carries an essay entitled, Reining in Big Data’s Robber Barons. Author Jennifer Cobbe comes out of the blocks forcefully, arguing: “Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other tech giants have constructed the most extensive and intrusive surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen. And we are the target”. Cobbe describes what she calls “surveillance capitalism”, a term she credits to Harvard academic Shoshana Zuboff. She concludes, “The questionable practices of surveillance corporations and their refusal to act responsibly have brought us to a turning point. This is a moment of decision: Will it be our Internet, or theirs?”
The new critique also has drawn in early champions of Big Data such as Alex “Sandy” Pentland and David Shrier of MIT’s Media Lab, who were early proponents of ethical data privacy practices. In an April 11 editorial in Newsweek, Facebook’s Arrogance Crisis, the authors note, “By failing to measure social and governance risk in an appropriate fashion, Facebook has endangered not only its market capitalization and shareholder return, but also its future cash flows”. They continue, “Ethical guidelines could also have helped moderate Facebook’s risk profile”.
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source http://news.statii.co.uk/how-big-data-became-big-bad-data/
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