Question

Every two days, mankind creates as much information as it did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. The amount of information that an average person is exposed to in a day is the same as a person from the 15th century was exposed to in his lifetime (Smolan, 2012).”

After reading the above information from Smolan’s book, think about the amount of data you generate or interface with on a daily basis. Compile a list of all the data point interactions and trace where the information originates and eventually ends. For example, if you use your credit card, where does the transaction information go and how is it used. Are you concerned about the explosion of data and your personal information? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like five exabytes of data, he says.

Let me repeat that: we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.

“The real issue is user-generated content,” Schmidt said. He noted that pictures, instant messages, and tweets all add to this.

Naturally, all of this information helps Google. But he cautioned that just because companies like his can do all sorts of things with this information, the more pressing question now is if they should. Schmidt noted that while technology is neutral, he doesn’t believe people are ready for what’s coming.

“I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,” Schmidt said.

With this kind of big data explosion, things can get out of hand. There is constant monitoring of our activities, be it shopping, social media, digital content consumption behavior, in short, all our actions are being recorded and monitored. The past has already demonstrated incidents where things have gone spiraling down due to such privacy interventions.

Edward Snowden leaked details of how the NSA (US National Security Agency) supervised extensive internet and phone surveillance of citizens without the public’s knowledge, which was a severe privacy breach. The most recent example is, of course, the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal. We bore witness to this misconduct where the personal information of more than 87 million users was collected against their knowledge. Information is power and it can be used in diabolical ways, especially when taken without the owner’s knowledge and privacy rights. Skeptics even claim that this data, collected from 2014, was influential in 2016’s US presidential campaign which led to Trump’s victory. Data used to influence public opinion is capable of making or breaking a country, maybe even the world.

It is a breach of trust to use data against the knowledge of the data owners. And yet, it is done rampantly. We are in need to create a fair data-driven world. Well, at least after the Facebook data-breach fiasco, people are more aware of the reality that we live in. Awareness is the first step to move forward and ignorance, in this case, isn’t bliss!