Data for Individual and Common Good — How Do We Get There?

“Data is seldom just about us. Society should benefit from it too.”

azeem
azeem
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

I’ve been lucky enough to get to know the work of Jeni Tennison and The Open Data Institute a little during the past year or so. They are thinking very deeply about how to build trusted institutions and systems around data.

I believe this is vital work. A world where citizen-consumers understand the value and risks of data may get us to a higher energy level where we can use data to tackle causes of disease, unhappiness & inequality while maintaining a healthy balance of power between the individual, family & community and business. One where we (and policymakers) don’t understand the range of ecosystems we can build around data (and the rules that govern them) lends itself to our lurching with ill-informed knee-jerk responses to real or imagined data abuses. Equally, a more nuanced understanding of the economics of data will allow better investments by firms and, in economist’s terms, result in welfare gains.

Jeni wrote about data ownership for the latest Exponential Viewpart of her essay follows below. If you enjoy it, you’ll love my weekly wondermissive about technology and society → subscribe.

Jeni Tennison on data ownership

Seems like no one is happy with big tech having (sole) access to lots of personal data. Data about us can and should be used for our (individual or collective) good, but what institutions and regulations do we need to make that happen?

Health data gives good examples of the challenges and experimental approaches. The genomic data of people who gave DNA testing company 23andMe permission to pass it on for research of donated for research will be used by GlaxoSmithKline to design new drugs. Savvy is a co-operative where members share in the profits created from sharing data about their health. Some think it would help to give users easy access to data about them and let them port it to competing services. EFF thinks data portability and interoperability are anti-monopoly medicine. Others are concerned about the privacy impacts.

Should data about me be property that I can sell access to (managed by blockchains!)? Our only source of income when AI steals our jobs? A recent analysis by Charles Jones & Christopher Tonetti puts some economic theory and numbers behind the observable maximisation of data use by firms when they own it. It suggests individual data ownership will create a perfect market that balances economic benefit with privacy concerns. At ODI, we’re sceptical. Data is seldom just about us. Society should benefit from it too. And it’s pretty impossible to understand the implications of the controls over data we’re already given; having data ownership won’t change that.

Mariana Mazzucato argues for a national(ised?) data repository that sells personal data to tech companies and uses the profits to fund the digital economy. Aral Balkin objects to state as well as capitalist surveillance, and calls for a combination of regulation and support for ethical alternative services. Evgeny Morozov thinks a middle path is city-level personal data stores. The UK’s AI review last year proposed data trusts. We’re trying to work out what that means.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, you can read the full issue here.

azeem

Written by

azeem

Entrepreneur, inventor and creator — curator of The Exponential View

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