Our Data, Ourselves
How to stop tech firms from monopolizing our personal information
By Philip N. Howard
Concentrated in a few hands, big data is a threat to democracy. Social media companies and political data-mining firms such as Cambridge Analytica have built their businesses by manipulating public life using personal data. Their work has helped heighten ethnic tensions, revive nationalism, intensify political conflict, and even produce new political crises in countries around the world — all while weakening public trust in journalism, voting systems, and electoral outcomes.
Such crises are symptoms of a deeper problem: the effective monopoly that a handful of technology firms have gained over a wealth of information relevant to public life. Fixing the situation requires putting the public back in charge of its data.
Democracy has long been predicated on, and reinforced by, social institutions that carefully collect information about public life and collective needs. Today, however, a handful of technology companies have far exceeded the data-gathering capacity of all other kinds of organizations. These private firms possess detailed information on the public — and having collected and stored data on every user’s attitudes, aspirations, and behaviors, they then use it to serve their bottom line. Social…
