Big idea: Nobody should know more about you than you do
As we put together the initial lineup and program for FWD50, we’re working on a central theme for our November event. With the pace of innovation and technology change, it’s hard to choose just one.
We’ve narrowed it down to six big ideas that keep coming up in travels and discussions. So over the next six posts, we’re going to look at each in a bit more detail.
When we talk about digital privacy, we’re missing most of the story. It’s not just that we need to protect citizens’ data — that is the bare minimum. It’s that for most of us, the government is the steward of much of our digital history. And we need access to it, because it’s the basis for self-analysis.
Back in 2015, I said that “a defining moral issue of the next decade will be that nobody should know more about your life than you do.” It isn’t just about others not having our data; it’s about us having that data.
While the data we hear about the most in media is shared — Facebook posts, Instagram pictures, purchasing history — there are reams of personal history held in government databases. That includes traffic tickets, vaccination records, income tax payments, and so on. But the data is siloed, inaccessible, and unstructured.
Algorithms trained on data make predictions about our shopping habits, travel preferences, and news feeds. Today, those algorithms are used on us; but one day, we’ll want them used by us. And they won’t be effective unless they have the data needed to be properly trained and to make good decisions.
Aurélie Pols wrote about privacy after my talk on personal data, (spoiler alert: Aurélie is a speaker at FWD50 this November!) and she’s been a cautious thinker on how we use and share data. We need more of her kind of thinking about the role of government in data sharing.
Today, agents such as Google, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana help a small fraction of the population be smarter, more productive, and better informed. In Canada, we consider healthcare and education fundamental rights. We’re starting to conclude that Internet access should be similarly universal. How long until a personal agent, trained on the data of our lives, used by us, becomes similarly ubiquitous?
The implications are wide-ranging: A cognitive upgrade of unprecedented proportions, able to simplify our lives. And the beginning of this is deciding that not only should others be able to use our data on our terms, but that we, too, should be able to use it.
