However, with great power comes great responsibility. Analytics is a very powerful weapon, and weapons can be abused.<\/p>\n
The past clearly shows that without proper controls, there can be irresistible temptations for companies and governments to combine data in ways that threaten personal liberties.\u00a0 Misuse of every previous data gathering technology has eventually come to light, sometimes only decades after the facts, leading to new laws re-establishing privacy limits.<\/p>\n
Modern technology makes the potential threat much greater than in the past. Combining \u201cmetadata\u201d from online activities, mobile devices, payment systems, surveillance cameras, medical histories, and social networks can reveal every nuance of our online and offline lives.<\/p>\n
While nobody is arguing that the Thought Police exists today, for the first time since I read George Orwell\u2019s \u201c1984\u201d thirty years ago, we have their technology capabilities:<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Analytics is, at best, a wonderful opportunity to shine light into the dark, to reveal what was previously concealed, and make it better. People and governments must be in the forefront of establishing clear, transparent guidelines that make the right tradeoffs between the public good and citizen\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n
We should not wait for abuses to come to light before acting. One common refrain that defends data gathering is \u201cif you\u2019re not doing anything wrong, what are you worried about?\u201d \u2013 if this were true, it should surely also apply to the organizations currently storing and using our data in \u201csecret\u201d ways today.<\/p>\n
I believe the vendors of analytics software should play a part in this debate, help encourage data safety and transparency, and provide the technology features that makes it easy for organizations to support these initiatives.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Big data analytics provide an amazing force for good in the world. But as with any powerful weapon, we need to prepare for abuses, too<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5256,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[27,67,100,160,173,204,327,454,1112,1134],"class_list":["post-12327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-thoughts","tag-bigdata","tag-abuse","tag-analytics","tag-bi","tag-big-data","tag-business-intelligence","tag-data","tag-ethics","tag-vendors","tag-weapon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/big-data-graphic-iceberg-690-1.jpg?fit=690%2C310&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3X9RF-3cP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5256"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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