by Randy Bean
Three years ago, in a May 2015 Wall Street Journal article entitled Tracing Some of Big Data’s Big Paradoxes, I quoted Washington University in St. Louis Law Professor Neil M. Richards in summing up the opportunities and challenges represented by Big Data, “Big Data will create winners and losers, and it is likely to benefit the institutions who wield its tools over the individuals being mined, analyzed, and sorted.”
Now, nearly three years later, the dark side of Big Data is dominating the headlines, and we can’t say that we weren’t warned. The Monday April 23 edition of The Wall Street Journal carries a book review by Gregg Easterbrook entitled Big Data, Big Problems. The review begins: “‘Big Data” is the Big Bad of our moment. Companies and governments amass enormous troves of information about our online and offline activities, so they can understand them better than we do. Recently we learned that creepy firms like Cambridge Analytica mine Big Data from websites such as Facebook. Facebook itself seems increasingly creepy, grounded in lying to the public about what happens to the data it collects”. So here we are three years later.
How did Big Data go from promise of the future to “Big Bad Data”? Professor Richards hinted at the dark side of Big Data back in 2015 when he noted, “Big Data promises to use data to make the world transparent, buts its collection is invisible, and its tools and techniques are opaque, shrouded by layers of physical, legal, and technical privacy by design”. Now in 2018, we have this view from Gregg Easterbrook: “In the future, will Big Data help physicians cure diseases or help health insurers deny claims? Make factories and products safer or accelerate layoffs? Ultimately spawn some kind of hostile artificial intelligence? Right now it’s fair to suppose that many people would favor putting the Big Data genie back into the bottle”.
Cautionary warnings about the perils of Big Data have now become omnipresent. The latest issue of The New York Review of Books carries an essay entitled, Reining in Big Data’s Robber Barons. Author Jennifer Cobbe comes out of the blocks forcefully, arguing: “Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other tech giants have constructed the most extensive and intrusive surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen. And we are the target”. Cobbe describes what she calls “surveillance capitalism”, a term she credits to Harvard academic Shoshana Zuboff. She concludes, “The questionable practices of surveillance corporations and their refusal to act responsibly have brought us to a turning point. This is a moment of decision: Will it be our Internet, or theirs?”
The new critique also has drawn in early champions of Big Data such as Alex “Sandy” Pentland and David Shrier of MIT’s Media Lab, who were early proponents of ethical data privacy practices. In an April 11 editorial in Newsweek, Facebook's Arrogance Crisis, the authors note, “By failing to measure social and governance risk in an appropriate fashion, Facebook has endangered not only its market capitalization and shareholder return, but also its future cash flows”. They continue, “Ethical guidelines could also have helped moderate Facebook’s risk profile”.
The proliferation of Big Data can be expected to continue to accelerate in the decades ahead. Where consumers and companies had reveled in the promise of personalized experience and convenience, the risks of untrammeled Big Data use and abuse now overshadow potential benefits. Big Data is not going away. Organizations and individuals must weigh the benefits and consequences of making data freely available for open use and access. It is incumbent upon the data industry and individuals as never before to develop sensible approaches and safeguards for managing Big Data as an asset. Data can be used to great benefit if governed wisely, and to great harm if deployed without regard to its consequences.
I used to tell a story to people who didn’t understand my work in the field of data, and found the terminology and concepts to be mystifying. I explained how my wife, who was in the medical profession (with its own mystifying terminology), would say to her colleagues, “I don’t understand what he does. I think he must work for the CIA!” Later, after it was revealed government agencies were maintaining data on private citizens, she updated her response to say that she was now convinced that I worked for the NSA. I retold this story to an executive the other day when he looked up at me and deadpanned, “And, it turns out that all that time you were working for Facebook!” Big Data has devoured itself. We have come full circle.
Randy Bean is an industry thought-leader and author, and CEO of NewVantage Partners, a strategic advisory and management consulting firm which he founded in 2001. He is a contributor to Forbes, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and The Wall Street Journal. You can contact him at rbean@newvantage.com and follow him at @RandyBeanNVP.
