Paying users for their personal data collected via their online activity will create a transparent and efficient data economy
The value of data to modern businesses helps them to know customers better, make better decisions, and boosts ROI, and form mutually beneficial and profitable business relationships with other organizations.
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We are in a digital economy where data acting as the new oil is more (fundamentally) valuable than ever, and the modern key to smooth and efficient functionality of everything from the government to local companies. Today, an unprecedented amount of analysable information on humans, things, and nature opens up vast opportunities for accelerated insights, innovation, economic growth, and advances in scientific and medical research.
The value of data to modern businesses helps them to know customers better, make better decisions, boosts return on investment (ROI), and form mutually beneficial and profitable business relationships with other organisations. According to a United Nations Financial Trade Quarterly (FTQ) report of 2019, the five largest data firms in the world today: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft—are actors in the digital data economy (compared to only one of them being an actor a decade ago) with a combined market value of nearly $4 trillion. This amount represents approximately 20 percent of market capitalisation in the US, and more than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of India.
Concerns with the existing form of economy
Interestingly enough, the people whose raw data is driving the fourth industrial revolution play a rather passive role in the modern digital economy as they are often left out of the value chain that transforms their raw data into huge monetary benefits.
In addition, this digital economy brings an added disadvantage to common people in the form of privacy risks. As they say, if this is the age of information, then privacy is the issue of our times.
Activities considered private in the past or shared with a few, now leave snippets of behavioral data that expose our privacy-sensitive traits, beliefs, and intentions. We communicate using e-mails, SMSs, and social media; find partners online; read and write on the cloud; seek response to sensitive questions using search engines; use geotracking guides to navigate on the road; and celebrate and mourn on social media. Through these and numerous other online activities, we reveal information—both knowingly and unintentionally—to one another, to commercial entities, and to our governments.
The monitoring of personal information is ubiquitous, and its storage durable enough to render one’s past undeletable. Accompanying this acceleration in data collection are steady AI (artificial intelligence) advancements in the ability to aggregate, analyse, and draw sensitive inferences from an individual’s data [eg via (non)federated learning].
As a glaring example of a major privacy fallout resulting from these advancements that are catalysed by the demands of the economy, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the influence of the 2016 US elections demonstrated that individuals are increasingly at a privacy risk and likely to be manipulated through big data aggregating and analysing firms. More generally, as valuable human experiences-bearing personal data account for a large part of big data in the mobile and Internet of Things age, they subsequently give rise to a new form of exploitative capitalism ie “surveillance capitalism”, in which raw and free information on society individuals is systematically and often shamelessly, and unfairly analysed using powerful AI tools to sell predictions on their behaviors to targeted advertising agencies, much like behavioral futures contracts.
[This article has been published with permission from IIM Calcutta. www.iimcal.ac.in Views expressed are personal.]