[bestbits] Big Data - big problem

[Janna Anderson]

+1, Ian.

Many of the problems were also outlined in a Pew Internet report issued in 2012. I wrote the report. You can see the report and all of the raw content here: http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/2012survey/future_Big_Data_2020.xhtml  The Pew site with the report is here: http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Future-of-Big-Data.aspx

Janna Anderson

Below is a short excerpt from the report that lists some of the survey respondents' criticisms of big data – keep in mind the survey was in the field in late 2011, prior to the closer scrutiny now being paid by all:
…  Some say the limitations of Big Data must be recognized

Open access to tools and data “transparency” are necessary for people to provide information checks and balances. Are they enough?

• “Big Data gives me hope about the possibilities of technology,” said Tom Hood, CEO of the Maryland Association of CPAs. “Transparency, accountability, and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ are all possible with the advent of Big Data combined with the tools to access and analyze the data in real time.”

Richard Lowenberg, director and broadband planner for the 1st-Mile Institute, urged, “Big Data should be developed within a context of openness and improved understandings of dynamic, complex whole ecosystems. There are difficult matters that must be addressed, which will take time and support, including: public- and private-sector entities agreeing to share data; providing frequently updated meta-data; openness and transparency; cost recovery; and technical standards.”

The Internet of Things will diffuse intelligence, but lots of technical hurdles must be overcome.

• Fred Hapgood, a tech consultant who ran MIT’s Nanosystems group in the 1990s, said, “I tend to think of the Internet of Things as multiplying points of interactivity—sensors and/or actuators—throughout the social landscape. As the cost of connectivity goes down the number of these points will go up, diffusing intelligence everywhere.”

An anonymous respondent wrote, “With the right legal and normative framework, the Internet of Things should make an astounding contribution to human life. The biggest obstacles to success are technological and behavioral; we need a rapid conversion to IPv6, and we need cooperation among all stakeholders to make the Internet of Things work. We also need global standards, not just US standards and practices, which draw practical and effective lines about how such a data trove may and may not be used consistent with human rights.”

Another anonymous survey participant said, “Apparently this 'Internet of Things' idea is beginning to encourage yet another round of cow-eyed Utopian thinking. Big Data will yield some successes and a lot of failures, and most people will continue merely to muddle along, hoping not to be mugged too frequently by the well-intentioned (or not) entrepreneurs and bureaucrats who delight in trying to use this shiny new toy to fix the world.”

In the end, humans just won’t be able to keep up

• Jeff Eisenach, managing director, Navigant Economics LLC, a consulting business, formerly a senior policy expert with the US Federal Trade Commission, had this to say: “Big Data will not be so big. Most data will remain proprietary, or reside in incompatible formats and inaccessible databases where it cannot be used in 'real time.' The gap between what is theoretically possible and what is done (in terms of using real-time data to understand and forecast cultural, economic, and social phenomena) will continue to grow.”

Humans, rather than machines, will still be the most capable of extracting insight and making judgments using Big Data. Statistics can still lie.

• “By 2020, most insights and significant advances will still be the result of trained, imaginative, inquisitive, and insightful minds,” wrote Donald G. Barnes, visiting professor at Guangxi University in China.

David D. Burstein, founder of Generation18, a youth-run voter-engagement organization, said, “As long as the growth of Big Data is coupled with growth of refined curation and curators it will be an asset. Without those curators the data will become more and more plentiful, more overwhelming and [it will] confuse our political and social conversations by an overabundance of numbers that can make any point we want to make them make.”

Those who see mostly negatives share the down side

Take off the rose-colored glasses: Big Data has the potential for significant negative impacts that may be impossible to avoid. “How to Lie with the Internet of Things” will be a best-seller.

• “There is a need to think a bit more about the distribution of the harms that flow from the rise of big, medium, and little data gatherers, brokers, and users,” observed communications expert Oscar Gandy. “If ‘Big Data’ could be used primarily for social benefit, rather than the pursuit of profit (and the social-control systems that support that effort), then I could ‘sign on’ to the data-driven future and its expression through the Internet of Things.”

“We can now make catastrophic miscalculations in nanoseconds and broadcast them universally. We have lost the balance inherent in 'lag time,'” added Marcia Richards Suelzer, senior analyst at Wolters Kluwer

An anonymous survey participant wrote, “Big Data will generate misinformation and will be manipulated by people or institutions to display the findings they want. The general public will not understand the underlying conflicts and will naively trust the output. This is already happening and will only get worse as Big Data continues to evolve.” Another anonymous respondent joked, “Upside: How to Lie with the Internet of Things becomes an underground bestseller.”

We won’t have the human or technological capacity to analyze
Big Data accurately and efficiently by 2020.

• “A lot of 'Big Data' today is biased and missing context, as it's based on convenience samples or subsets,” said Dan Ness, principal research analyst at MetaFacts. “We're seeing valiant, yet misguided attempts to apply the deep datasets to things that have limited relevance or applicability. They're being stretched to answer the wrong questions. I'm optimistic that by 2020, this will be increasingly clear and there will be true information pioneers who will think outside the Big Data box and base decisions on a broader and balanced view. Instead of relying on the 'lamppost light,' they will develop and use the equivalent of focused flashlights.”

Mark Watson, senior engineer for Netflix, said, “I expect this will be quite transformative for society, though perhaps not quite in just the next eight years.”

And Christian Huitema, distinguished engineer with Microsoft, said, “It will take much more than ten years to master the extraction of actual knowledge from Big Data sets.”

Respondents are concerned about the motives of governments and corporations, the entities that have the most data and the incentive to analyze it. Manipulation and surveillance are at the heart of their Big Data agendas.

• “The world is too complicated to be usefully encompassed in such an undifferentiated Big Idea. Whose ‘Big Data’ are we talking about? Wall Street, Google, the NSA? I am small, so generally I do not like Big,” wrote John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org

An anonymous survey participant wrote, “Data aggregation is growing today for two main purposes: National security apparatus and ever-more-focused marketing (including political) databases. Neither of these are intended for the benefit of individual network users but rather look at users as either potential terrorists or as buyers of goods and services.”

Another anonymous respondent said, “Money will drive access to large data sets and the power needed to analyze and act on the results of the analysis. The end result will, in most cases, be more effective targeting of people with the goal of having them consume more goods, which I believe is a negative for society. I would not call that misuse, but I would call it a self-serving agenda.”

Another wrote, “It is unquestionably a great time to be a mathematician who is thrilled by unwieldy data sets. While many can be used in constructive, positive ways to improve life and services for many, Big Data will predominantly be used to feed people ads based on their behavior and friends, to analyze risk potential for health and other forms of insurance, and to essentially compartmentalize people and expose them more intensely to fewer and fewer things.”

The rich will profit from Big Data and the poor will not.

• Brian Harvey, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley, wrote, “The collection of information is going to benefit the rich, at the expense of the poor. I suppose that for a few people that counts as a positive outcome, but your two choices should have been ‘will mostly benefit the rich’ or ‘will mostly benefit the poor,’ rather than ‘good for society’ and ‘bad for society.’  There's no such thing as ‘society.’ There's only wealth and poverty, and class struggle. And yes, I know about farmers in Africa using their cell phones to track prices for produce in the big cities. That's great, but it's not enough.”

Frank Odasz, president of Lone Eagle Consulting, said, “The politics of control and the politics of appearances will continue to make the rich richer and diminish the grassroots and disenfranchised until the politics of transparency make it necessary for the top down to partner meaningfully with the bottom up in visible, measurable ways. The grassroots boom in bottom-up innovation will increasingly find new ways to self-organize as evidenced in 2011 by the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring movements.”

Purposeful education about Big Data might include priming for the anticipation of manipulation. Maybe trust features can be built in.

• Heywood Sloane, principal at CogniPower, said, “This isn't really a question about the Internet or Big Data—it's a question about who and how much people might abuse it (or anything else), intentionally or otherwise. That is a question that is always there—thus there is a need for a countervailing forces, competition, transparency, scrutiny, and/or other ways to guard against abuse. And then be prepared to misjudge sometimes.”

“Never underestimate the stupidity and basic sinfulness of humanity,” reminded Tom Rule, educator, technology consultant, and musician based in Macon, Georgia.

Barry Parr, owner and analyst for MediaSavvy, contributed this thought: “Better information is seldom the solution to any real-world social problems. It may be the solution to lots of business problems, but it's unlikely that the benefits will accrue to the public. We're more likely to lose privacy and freedom from the rise of Big Data.”

And an anonymous respondent commented, “Data is misused today for many reasons, the solution is not to restrict the collection of data, but rather to raise the level of awareness and education about how data can be misused and how to be confident that data is being fairly represented and actually answers the questions you think it does.”

From: Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com<mailto:ian.peter at ianpeter.com>>
Reply-To: Ian Peter <ian.peter at ianpeter.com<mailto:ian.peter at ianpeter.com>>
Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2013 4:25 PM
To: "governance at lists.igcaucus.org<mailto:governance at lists.igcaucus.org>" <governance at lists.igcaucus.org<mailto:governance at lists.igcaucus.org>>, "bestbits at lists.bestbits.net<mailto:bestbits at lists.bestbits.net>" <bestbits at lists.bestbits.net<mailto:bestbits at lists.bestbits.net>>
Subject: [bestbits] Big Data - big problem

I think corporate and governmental surveillance and unregulated use of our personal data is a huge issue. This article from Bruce Schneier gives a lot of good background on how bad things are - in an earlier essay he likened the problem to the pollution of the early industrial era which went unregulated until it became a massive uncontrollable problem.

We really do have to get on top of this one - and unfortunately large internet corporations whose profit is dependent on using our personal data and governments of differing political persuasions who are part of alliances that give unregulated permission to do anything to their surveillance communities are not going to help. Big problem...

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/20/opinion/schneier-stalker-economy/index.html


Ian Peter


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