What is the difference between personal and open data?
Personal data is personal. It’s about the
human being and it’s deeply connected with privacy.
Open data is data that can be anonymised and
useful as an aggregate of many people’s
data in order to ascertain things about the
way we live.
Open data for me is the start of great conversation
and discussions about what are the best ideas
for mankind pushing forwards.
What data is important to you?
Personal data is phenomenal, because it really
does offer insight into people’s desires.
You look at something like a search
engine, and a search engine is a classic intention
machine, what is it that somebody wants to
get?
In any hardware that I buy, I always switch
off location services.
My big fear is location data being accessed
by the wrong people.
Information that changes my status within
a system, I’m uncomfortable with.
That changes for example, the stuff that’s
advertised at me.
I’ve made a very strong decision for example,
that to, to release as little data as possible
about my children in order to give them the
choice when they grow up about how much of
their personal lives they want to make open
and available to everybody else. I don’t
want to have made that decision for them.
You implicate other people in activities,
behaviours, assumptions,
when you put relational data online.
How do companies make use of this data?
We are at such an early stage in the evolution
of what the internet will become.
That businesses are like infants, their manners are horrible.
There is a case in which a father phoned up
Target and said what are you doing?
You keep sending all these coupons to my daughter
with diapers and with baby food and with baby
jumpers and baby grows and all this kind of
stuff, what are you doing? She’s sixteen
years old. And Target saying, well maybe you
need to have a conversation with your daughter
because our big database has managed to pull
lots of information together.
It can go very quickly from being personal
and nice and useful to extremely creepy.
It would never occur to anybody in a mature
industry like retailing, to trail somebody
out of a store and plant a tracking beacon
on them and say, don’t worry this isn’t
personal, we’re only trying to follow you
around and see what you’re doing so we can
give you a better advertising experience.
It’s a ludicrous notion on its face.
If you wanted more privacy for your email,
you could go and get email by paying for it
and paying a relatively small amount of money
and then not having your email analysed. Most
people would rather not pay money for their
emails, so they make a trade off for the advertising.
There are really legitimate uses for big data,
you know, for if you’re a pharmaceutical company,
if you’re in medicine, you want
to know as much as possible about the human
genome, about the conditions of disease. If
you’re a power company you want to know
about power use and consumption and distribution
and as many variables as you can get into
that. And that, to me, those are extremely
legitimate uses for big data.
It allows them to hopefully cater to their
audience in a more informed manner.
But where the big money is being spent, where
investment within organisations is moving
from manufacturing, operations, IT, all sorts
of other places, it's moving to marketing.
because its this assumption that people are coughing
up data all the time whether they know it
or not.
There’s an example of a prominent social
network that’s released an application that,
that basically listens to what’s going on
in the room to try and work out what TV shows
might be going on in the background. In actual
fact, that’s in LG’s privacy agreements
as well saying that if you, if you use the
sound command features of the televisions,
it wasn’t left to doubt, it actually said
that private speech that occurs in the same
room will be captured. So, their essentially
– lots of things can be private apart from
speech, you know – essentially yeah, it’s
a hot mic.
Why should people care?
We always make mistakes and we always want
to forget them and the trouble with the internet
is that we can’t forget them.
I think the average person who’s going about
their daily business doing whatever,
they don’t care, don’t have a clue
and probably shouldn’t really. As long as
if something comes up and there’s a problem
that emerges, they have access to tools.
If I was ever to have children I’d be very
nervous about them having their smart phones
giving away their location data to certain
applications because there’s many applications
that come across as genuine, but are actually,
you know they have ulterior motives that are
tracking data in the background.
You create your identity by showing different
aspects of your personality to the world.
If you’re different to different people,
if you have no privacy, you can’t do that.
The economy as a scale will favour the people
who essentially hand over their data and the
rest of us will be faced with a difficult
or impossible choice if we want to actually
opt out of that because you know, life will
just become quite inconvenient.
Fight for the spaces where what
you do now isn’t going to come and bite
you in the butt in the future because that
is part of our human, personal, psychological
and social evolution.
The ideal solution is to get to the situation
where the end user doesn’t have to care.
