David Lazer and Ryan Kennedy at Wired: “….The issue of using big data for the common good is far more general than Google—which deserves credit, after all, for offering the occasional peek at their data. These records exist because of a compact between individual consumers and the corporation. The legalese of that compact is typically obscure (how many people carefully read terms and conditions?), but the essential bargain is that the individual gets some service, and the corporation gets some data.
What is left out that bargain is the public interest. Corporations and consumers are part of a broader society, and many of these big data archives offer insights that could benefit us all. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has said, “We must remember that technology remains a tool of humanity.” How can we, and corporate giants, then use these big data archives as a tool to serve humanity?
Google’s sequel to GFT, done right, could serve as a model for collaboration around big data for the public good. Google is making flu-related search data available to the CDC as well as select research groups. A key question going forward will be whether Google works with these groups to improve the methodology underlying GFT. Future versions should, for example, continually update the fit of the data to flu prevalence—otherwise, the value of the data stream will rapidly decay.
This is just an example, however, of the general challenge of how to build models of collaboration amongst industry, government, academics, and general do-gooders to use big data archives to produce insights for the public good. This came to the fore with the struggle (and delay) for finding a way to appropriately share mobile phone data in west Africa during the Ebola epidemic (mobile phone data are likely the best tool for understanding human—and thus Ebola—movement). Companies need to develop efforts to share data for the public good in a fashion that respects individual privacy.
There is not going to be a single solution to this issue, but for starters, we are pushing for a “big data” repository in Boston to allow holders of sensitive big data to share those collections with researchers while keeping them totally secure. The UN has its Global Pulse initiative, setting up collaborative data repositories around the world. Flowminder, based in Sweden, is a nonprofit dedicated to gathering mobile phone data that could help in response to disasters. But these are still small, incipient, and fragile efforts.
The question going forward now is how build on and strengthen these efforts, while still guarding the privacy of individuals and the proprietary interests of the holders of big data….(More)”