Big Data: the flip side of the coin

The implications of mass-scale data collection on our society and personal freedom

Big Data knows no end. Each day, we produce 2.5 exabytes of data [1]. In five years, it will be 463 [2]. As of today, data is the world’s most valuable commodity [3], to the point that it has spawned an industry so lucrative to raise concerns about the safety of our democracy [4]. This shouldn’t take us by surprise. Every couple of days, we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up to 2003 [5]. What could go wrong?

According to Credence Research, Big Data is expected to reach $105.08 bn by 2027 at a CAGR of 12.3%. In 2018, it was valued at $37.34 bn [6]. Not that big of a number in proportion to the world’s economy. But if we look at the whole story, the bulk of revenues of the S&P 5 [7] comes from data exploitation. In 2019, Facebook’s revenues were about $70 bn [8] while Google’s website advertising, which is Big Data by another name, amassed $113.26 bn [9], contributing 70.46% to the $160.74 bn accrued by Alphabet in the same year [10]. And these are just two companies. According to Deloitte, by 2030, data collection and analysis will become the basis of all future service offerings and business models [11].

How did we ever come to this? For the most part, the reason is convenience. In 1965, when Moore’s law was formulated, the notion that, one day, a third of our time awake would be digitized was outlandish [12]. Yet, the desire to immortalize life as it happens has always been common throughout history. It is only due to storage capacity becoming cheaper and cheaper that data has turned to phlebotinum. Telecommuting, entertainment, productivity — we’ve realized the digital utopia that was laughed at 25 years ago [13]. As a result, our dependence on data has ballooned. Nowadays, the average millennial would rather give up driving than their smartphone or computer [14]. Day by day, we are slowly entering the simulation.

The implications of this phenomenon are far-reaching. Studies find that adolescents with internet addiction tend to have higher ADHD symptoms, depression, social phobia, and hostility [15]. You may think that this has little to do with Big Data, and yet you couldn’t be farther from the truth. The posts we publish, the websites we are registered on, the warranty cards we fill out, the stuff we buy in store and on the internet, our typing patterns, our face — everything, including the most meaningless of our behaviours, is thoroughly recorded, catalogued, sold, rent, and data-mined, forever — in perpetuity [16]. Mind you — this isn’t limited to the information you willingly provided. Facebook, for one, collects data points on non-Facebook users [17]. Such as:

• Age
• Religious Affiliation
• Technology Interest
• Expectant or New Parent
• Gender
• Political Affiliation
• Social Media Usage
• Real Property Attributes
• Height
• Household Income
• Vehicle Ownership
• New Mover/Renter/Owner
• Weight
• Net Worth
• Credit Card Usage
• Discount Shopper
• Race
• Marital Status
• Vacation Habits
• High-End Shopper
• Ethnicity
• Biker
• Cholesterol Focus
• Home Loan Type
• Occupation
• Presence of Children

The thing is, there is no opt-out. Whether it’s social media [18], work [19] or even finance [20], digital products are no different than slot machines. And it’s more than a few bad apples [21]. Through data brokers, A/B testing, deep learning, global-scale social experiments, and shady gamification tactics, these weapons of math destruction profile us, identify our weak spot and, little by little, one dopamine hit after another, they hack their way into our social validation feedback loop. And then, before you know it, you’ve spent countless hours scrolling instead of doing what you wanted to. Don’t bother: “this is the most distracted age in history”[22]. And you are addicted. Oh, and by the way — yes, this is by design.

“I think the most important thing to know about living in the 21st century” says Yuval Noah Harari, historian and New York Times bestseller, “is that humans are now hackable animals. To hack a human, you need to understand that human better than he or she understands themselves.” Behavioral reverse engineering. How is that possible? That’s the tricky thing about big data: the game is rigged. Lazy, domesticated humans vs supercomputers and armies of engineers. As we go on, living our life on autopilot [23], the large data sets that we produce are filtered through the lenses of machine learning algorithms looking for patterns in the dark to deduce further information. To use the words of computer scientist Jaron Lanier: “any time two people connect, the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third person who’s paying to manipulate those two people. So we’ve created an entire global generation of people who are raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture is manipulation.”

Through this process, data becomes knowledge, which in turn informs future discoveries. The end result is a deeply intertwined, permanent, humongous web of data points that are used to predict our behaviour. Surveillance capitalism.

As of today, machine learning is in its adolescence, but as we approach the second half of the chessboard [24] it is not foolish to imagine us putting our faith in algorithms rather than in humans.

This is not simply about privacy and power imbalance. It is also about freedom of speech. “When you think you’re being watched, you change your behaviour,” says privacy designer Tijmen Schep. “Like oil leads to global warming, data leads to social cooling.” As anything we read, write, watch, say, listen to, take a picture or video of is permanently stored, the possibility that this frighteningly big wealth of information will be used to judge us in the future is not a stretch. In fact, it’s already happening. Ever heard of the cancel culture? Quoting Y Combinator’s founder Paul Graham,

“Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It’s the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.”

In modern times, “killed” may sound extreme, but just four years ago, Myanmar’s armed forces and police pulled off a genocide against the Rohingya people in Rakhine State, exploiting Facebook’s data goldmine to incite crimes against humanity. It’s the misinformation age. And this is just one example. Who knows how many terrible things are happening right now while we’re being sedated? Because, at the end of the day, the consequences of big data far outweigh the benefits: reduced attention span, depression, anxiety, risk-aversion, conformity, social rigidity, layoffs, and sometimes even death.

Is there a way out of this Moloch?

If you want to get off the leash, there is a way. First, drop your screen time. The internet is like booze: without moderation it is harmful. Plus, pick your content diet by yourself, don’t let the algorithm choose it for you. Encrypt everything. Be stingy with your data. Don’t trust, verify. Pretty much, treat the internet as a highly addictive drug.

Mind you: these simple rules will make you less internet-dependent over time, but they won’t fix the data economy. You might think I’m a pessimist, but I believe the system can’t be reformed. The only way out is to start over.

Notes

[1] Source: IBM

[2] Source: World Economic Forum

[3] Source: The Economist

[4] Source: The New York Times

[5] Source: Eric Schmidt, as reported on TechCrunch

[6] Source: Credence Research

[7] Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook account for nearly 20% of the S&P 500, hence S&P 5 — an expression popularized by CNN.

[8] Source: Statista

[9] Source: Statista

[10] Source: Statista

[11] Source: Deloitte

[12] Source: The latest Digital 2019 report, from Hootsuite and We Are Social, shows we’re spending on average 6 hours and 42 minutes online each day.

[13] Source: In 1995, Newsweek published an article titled “The Internet? Bah!” where now commonplace activities were dismissed as baloney.

[14] Source: Huffington Post

[15] “The comorbid psychiatric symptoms of Internet addiction: attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, social phobia, and hostility”. Authors: Ju-Yu Yen, Chih-Hung Ko, Cheng-Fang Yen, Hsiu-Yueh Wu, Ming-Jen Yang.

[16] Source: Federal Trade Commission

[17] The so-called shadow profile — Source. Facebook does so by exploiting the data that Facebook users share about non-Facebook users as well as by buying data of both Facebook and non-Facebook users through several data brokers — Source.

[18] Sean Parker, former President of Facebook, said Facebook was designed to “exploit a vulnerability in human psychology”. Source: Axios.

[19] The gig economy employs gamification tactics to a large extent. Source: The Guardian.

[20] Robinhood, an online trading app largely built upon gamification mechanics, has come under scrutiny by regulators after the suicide of a young man from Illinois, who was led into massive debt without fully understanding what he was doing. More on this on Kiplinger.

[21] Source: Nature

[22] Source: CNN

[23] which, in turn, creates more opportunity for sharing, thereby creating more data. In short, addiction to data turns our life into a digital life, i.e. more data, further strengthening the addiction.

[24] The “second half of the chessboard” is an expression coined by Brynjolfsson and McAfee from MIT in regard to technological innovation. More on this on TechCrunch.

[25] Source: The New York Times