Last year at the World Economic Forum there were a number of people talking about the
fact that they see big data as a new asset class. I think Zack Bogue, who is Marissa
Mayer’s husband, was telling us about this also. When we were doing research, he and
Marissa were both incredibly helpful to us in kind of conceptualizing the whole project.
There’s a story in the book about a gentleman who has a pacemaker; it’s a wireless pacemaker,
so throughout his day the data from his heart is transmitted to his doctor, and he actually
spent time looking at his exercise, his nutrition, his alcohol consumption, and he wanted to
find out whether there is some correlation between his other activities and when his
pacemaker kicked in. So he called the manufacture saying, “Could I get a copy of the last
six months of my heart data?” and they said, "Sorry, sir, this is proprietary." He said,
“Wait a second. This is my heart. You have been collecting information about my heart;
I want a copy of the information.” They have refused to give it to him.
What I love about the story is it kind of makes you think, well, wait a second, why
is it that my browser history is being sold to the highest advertiser, there’s credit
card companies selling the data about what I’m consuming, everybody’s trading in
all the data that I’m creating, and here’s a guy who - someone is actually recording
his heartbeat and when his pacemaker kicks in, and yet we don’t have access to most
of this, we have no control over who’s using it. It’s very valuable, and yet, we as
the people manufacturing it don’t seem to have any say over who's using it or what they're
doing with it. And I think that’s got to change. I think that we have to have
the ability to decide what we share and what we don’t.
I read recently that there was a credit card company that admitted that they were actually
looking at people‘s Facebook profiles and that people that were listening to rap music
were given a lower credit rating score because somehow, statistically, people listen to rap
music were somehow a more of a credit risk. My twelve year old listens to rap music. The
fact that there are algorithms and programs out there that are making decisions about
my ability to get credit, that I have no idea on what I’m being judged by, what books
I read, who I talk to, what music I’m listening to. This is very scary stuff.
The whole point of doing this Human Face of Big Data project, which was sponsored,
by the way, by EMC, one of the largest players in the big data space, but they - I’m a
journalist, so they had no right of review or censorship. They didn’t even see this
project 'til the book and the iPad app came out. They basically gave us the ability
to kind of start this global conversation. . . .
A lot of my friends in the journalism world, who are hearing about big data for the first
time, have said to me, well, is this just a big promotion for big data? Is it just,
yay, big data’s going to solve all of our problems? My response has been that every
time there’s a new tool, whether it's Internet or cell phones or anything else, all these
things can be used for good or evil. Technology is neutral; it depends on how it’s used.
So I think that what I’m trying to do, what I’m hoping that the Human Face of Big Data project
will do, is to get people talking and thinking about this in a way that perhaps is thought
provoking and disturbing and exciting. I mean, there’s a lot of stories in the book
where you go, that’s so cool; that’s wonderful. I love this!
A lot of people believe that the ability to measure - instead of doing a random sampling,
which is what we used to do; we used to go out and ask people, twenty thousand people
a question, and they would say, this is what everybody thinks. We're able to do much
more nuance now. We're almost able to poll people all over the world at the same time.
There’s five million people now that carry cell phones, particularly in the developing
world. So we're actually - a lot of people have been speculating that soon we may be
able to actually measure the heartbeat of everybody on earth simultaneously, which is
kind of a fascinating idea. What would that mean if you could actually listen to this
global heartbeat and actually sense this pattern of behavior across the planet in the course
of a day? I mean, in a way Twitter has become that. Twitter has become sort of a new way
of sort of listening in on the conversation in real time.
So, there’s a lot of questions out there. Big data is a brand new tool; we’ve never
seen anything quite like this before, and I hope people will turn the pages of the book
and want to share the stories with each other.