Hacking Happiness: Why Your Personal Data Counts and How Tracking It Can Change the World (2015)
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2
Be a Provider
BROADCASTING VALUE IN THE PERSONAL DATA ECONOMY
I WANT YOU TO GET UP RIGHT NOW AND GO TO THE WINDOW. OPEN IT, AND STICK YOUR HEAD OUT, AND YELL, “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
—Howard Beale, in the film Network
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BIG DATA
Courts have recognized celebrities’ claims to a property interest in their name and fame to seek compensation whenever such an image is used for a commercial purpose. Why not extend such a property interest to the personal data of ordinary individuals? For, with the advent of digital technologies, hasn’t personal data of us all become an asset that is worth real money?1
CORIEN PRINS
THIS ISN’T A BOOK about getting angry. But it is a book about Hacking H(app)iness, which involves reevaluating ideas about the ways you measure what you value in your life. And like Howard Beale from the movie Network, I think your life has value. And in the Connected World, that value is fiscal as well as inherent.
Much of the debate around privacy with new technologies doesn’t stem from ethics, but economics. When I say you have a right to privacy no matter what your preference, I’m also saying you have a right to your money. Your currency. The stuff you put in a bank.
Nonetheless, in relation to privacy issues, it’s common to hear phrases like “But kids these days don’t care about privacy—they’re used to sharing their pictures on Facebook and grew up using social media.” First off, the scope of these statements is simply absurd. Not all “kids” feel the same about privacy, plus most teens have a better awareness about setting their privacy controls than many adults. Secondly, once you become aware that data regarding people’s identity is being sold, stop making the conversation about privacy. Make it about economics and see the reaction.
Old Conversation
CONCERNED ADULT: Don’t you care you’re giving private data away to brokers?
SAMPLE YOUTH: Not if they give me a coupon or whatever.
New Conversation
CONCERNED ADULT: Don’t you care you’re giving $1,200 per year away to data brokers in exchange for a few coupons?
SAMPLE YOUTH: Why don’t I get any of that money?
Alexis C. Madrigal elaborated on this point in the Atlantic:
In a survey by Carnegie Mellon’s Lorrie Cranor and Stanford’s Aleecia McDonald, only 11 percent of Americans would be willing to pay a dollar per month to withhold their data from their favorite news site. However, 69 percent of Americans were not willing to accept a dollar discount on their Internet bills in exchange for allowing their data to be tracked. That is to say: if people think data is already flowing to a website, few would pay to hold it back . . . The companies making the data-tracking tools have serious incentive to erode the idea of privacy not just because they can make (more) money, but because privacy erosion leads to more privacy erosion.2
One of the primary reasons we’ve all become complacent about privacy is not just because of our preferences toward technology; it’s because the people who stand to lose money if we own our data don’t want us to cut into their profits. While the value of a person’s data depends on things like their age, where they live, and how much time they spend online, keep this point clear in your mind: Other people make more money off of your data than you do.
While the Internet advertising model shifts to adopt consumer awareness of the personal data economy, we also need to be accountable for our actions regarding payment of content providers. The 11 percent of Americans willing to pay one dollar to withhold their data may be opting to pay that dollar to the news site as an exchange of value. Content providers need to pay bills like anyone else, so many offer visitors the chance to pay in exchange for an advertising-free environment. We’ve been trained, however, to know we can find similar free content on dozens of sites, so typically don’t remain loyal where content feels commoditized. By and large, this means content providers need advertising dollars to derive revenue from any eyeballs that visit their site, however fleetingly.
What this means for consumers is we want the best of both worlds: We don’t want to be tracked or have our data be sold to brokers. But we’re also not willing to pay for content, so we unwittingly keep a broken advertising model afloat that erodes consumer privacy while profiting a diminishing number of Internet services that don’t want things to change.
But that’s the way things are, you say. Who cares?
You do. You just don’t realize how technologies like augmented reality and facial recognition mean people can tag your image and sell it like they do right now. But the visual economy doesn’t have terms and conditions for you to sign. Whether or not you care about privacy, if the broken Internet model goes virtual, people make money off your image and identity without your even knowing. So the next time you’re thinking of leaving a content provider’s site because they asked you to contribute money so they don’t have to be reliant on advertising dollars, remember: In the virtual world you’re not just the product.
You’re the content.
The Personal Data Economy
If your personal data is the same as money, it deeply affects the economics of your life. When you broadcast your data, whether it’s personal via quantified self or public via the Internet of Things, start picturing yourself walking around with dollar bills hanging out of your pockets. Then picture someone taking those dollars from your pockets while saying, “Can you wear looser pants tomorrow to make it easier for me to fleece you?”
Seriously, picture this image and tell me you’re still complacent. As a parent, picture someone doing that to your kids while they’re also exposing their image and private information for anyone to see or stalk. Are you angry yet? Now picture a future where this practice will accelerate, where your currency gets traded without your involvement. Now join me in opening a window to let everyone hear you as you scream to the world, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
People controlling an economy control power. The term “Big Data” could just as well be called “big money.” It doesn’t make a difference if your data may not be worth as much as someone else’s. It’s worth something. When broadcast, any digital information relating to your image, words, or actions becomes part of the personal data economy. Broadcasting in this context can be viewed in an economic context, where personal data is an issue of property versus privacy. As Corien Prins notes in an article in SCRIPTed:
In looking at privacy as a problem of social cost, commentators have argued that the prospects for effective personal data protection may be enhanced by recognizing a property right of such data. They feel that the present conception of privacy is an ineffectual paradigm and that, if we want strong privacy protection, we must replace it with the more powerful instrument of a property right.3
Data is property. Intellectual property, or IP, is such a big deal for companies because it implies ownership. Your likeness, actions, and history belong to you—at least until you give them away.
You’ve got an intimate and personal stake in the Big Data revolution: Your Little Data is part of it.
The Basics of Big Data
Among data scientists and tech geeks, “Big Data” is largely seen as a marketing term. It’s too general a concept to be tied to any one industry, referring to the concept of massive data sets from multiple sources. The term evolved as chips and hardware have become smaller and cheaper in the past few years, allowing for an explosion of data that currently has been too granular to collect. To give a sense of how vast the world of Big Data has become, the International Data Corporation’s digital universe study from December 2012 says that the digital world will reach forty zigabytes by 2020, an amount that is equal to fifty-seven times the amount of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.4 You begin to see why using the phrase “Big Data” is akin to saying “the Internet.” It’s too vast and general to have meaning in and of itself. As Rufus Pollock, founder and codirector of the Open Knowledge Foundation, pointed out in his article for the Guardian, the size of data isn’t the priority. What’s important is having the data and the best context to derive insights from it.5
In terms of characterizing Big Data, many experts refer to the “three Vs” of Big Data—volume, variety, and velocity:
· Volume has to do with scale, as indicated by the IDC’s statistics above.
· Variety has to do with a number of new informational formats, as IBM notes in their report Analytics: The Real-World Use of Big Data: “The digitization of virtually ‘everything’ now creates new types of large and real-time data across a broad range of industries. Much of this is nonstandard data: for example, streaming, geospatial, or sensor-generated data that does not fit neatly into traditional, structured, relational warehouses.”6
· Velocity has to do with the ever-increasing speed at which all of these data are flowing into servers or the cloud where it’s stored until ready for use by an organization. Typically as a first way to analyze huge pools of data, organizations will use a platform like Hadoop that allows for distributed processing of data across multiple computers or individuals. A rough analogy for this would be having a massive amount of data placed within Excel spreadsheets to allow for information to be captured without being analyzed.
If you haven’t tried to categorize large sets of data, I can tell you from experience that it can be overwhelming to try to make sense of multiple types of information all related to your business or life. But once a framework for understanding has been established, the value of the insights mined from Big Data can be transformative. This is why finding someone to interpret what your data means is of paramount importance.
When the New Oil Is Crude
The phrase “Data is the new oil” is attributed to a woman named Ann Winblad, senior partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. It squarely positions data in an economic sense via a metaphorical comparison to the oil industry. And in the same way that the control of oil can dictate economic advantage, the interpretation of data can steer decisions that can deeply affect the outcome of an individual, company, or organization. Like oil, data also has to be refined for it to have value to an organization, or it remains “crude” and unusable.
The critical decisions of refinement are being left more and more to data scientists, the Merlin-like programmers who work to determine how best to manage an organization’s information. Up to now, this role has typically been filled by an IT staffer tasked with organizing company infrastructure to benefit corporate information. But the vast wealth of data at modern organizations requires a new set of skills that includes marketing savvy along with digital expertise. As Claire Cain Miller reports in the New York Times, Big Data expertise is so new that curricula or programs haven’t been developed for the field. Data science is also such a broad field of study that it’s more of an academic discipline than just a smattering of specific courses.7
The danger of allowing data scientists to be the sole evaluators of how data should be interpreted is that they may not always know the full context of how it’s going to be used. In the Big Data industry, this tension is referred to as domain versus data science expertise. As an example, a marketing-focused employee at an organization may want to understand what the social sentiment about a certain product means regarding a recent sale. However, not being versed in the tools of sentiment analysis, the marketer won’t know the specific type of report to ask for from a data scientist.
I discussed this issue in an article for Mashable, “Big Data’s Value Lies in Self-Regulation,”8 with Jake Porway. Jake is the founder of DataKind, an organization that brings together leading data scientists and high-impact social organizations through a comprehensive, collaborative approach that leads to positive action through data. Here’s an excerpt from the piece with regard to finding a balance between knowing what to ask for from data and how to interpret it:
“My biggest fear is that data science is used as a blunt tool and that people don’t understand the cultural implications of quantifying our world,” says Jake Porway . . . [who is] as much a data philosopher as scientist. Gifted at navigating the channel between hacking and hypothesizing, he is adamant about helping people understand how to create context as well as code for insights based on big data. [Regarding this balance,] he says, “This due diligence should be embedded in our craft.”9
The amount of information available via Big Data means organizations need to break down silos between IT and marketing, whatever people’s titles. More data is a blessing as long as everyone works together to make the best sense of what it means.
From Big to Little Data—Profit from the Personal
The term “Little Data” has evolved as a label for the digital information directly relating to consumers. This could be output from your quantified self app or data from sensors in your car relating to your driving behavior. But whereas Big Data refers to a multifaceted organization, Little Data is focused squarely on you. Mark Bonchek describes the evolving relationship between Big and Little Data in his article “Little Data Makes Big Data More Powerful,” citing the need for brands to begin empowering customers by helping provide them with this granular information about themselves to make more informed purchasing decisions.10 Note that “Little Data” in this context doesn’t mean there’s less information available for analysis; it means the analysis is focused on just your data. The applications for this level of data scrutiny are endless. Patrick Tucker even showed how two researchers could predict a person’s approximate location up to eighty weeks into the future at an accuracy level above 80 percent.11
If Little Data can predict your behavior almost two years into the future, it should be obvious by now how important it is to get a handle on your data.
In my Mashable article “Big Data’s Value Lies in Self-Regulation,”12 I interviewed Martin Blinder, founder of Tictrac, a platform that aggregates apps to help create and manage user’s projects to manage their day-to-day lives. The service is gaining a lot of traction with users, largely because it appeals to the notion of Little Data by functioning as a sort of iTunes marketplace for all of the “life project” apps currently in the marketplace. If users already have a number of different devices, they can aggregate them with Tictrac and focus on a specific type of program, like health or fitness. The company has brokered deals with multiple partners to help achieve this goal, and its platform also syncs with over forty application programming interfaces. Functioning as a data dashboard, Tictrac will eventually begin to learn a user’s behavior to personalize information. Blinder believes this type of evolved adaptation will help people design their lives in the future. “By creating a context around lifestyle design, we’re enabling a world where anybody can find data relevant to them. I feel we’re reaching a point in history where we can really empower ourselves based on an understanding of our own data.”13
Like many aspects of technology, its greatest power is the ability to disappear so users can focus on improving their lives.
From Broken to Broker
Your personal data gets around. Sometimes it’s little, focused on your individual actions. Sometimes it’s part of a big picture, a part of an economy that’s still in its infancy. Right now, advertisers and data brokers are Hacking Your H(app)iness, analyzing the behavior on what brings you meaning to mine insights for their commercial gain. Once you realize your data is an asset, however, you’ll claim it as your own and get rid of the middleman.
You’ll become the data broker. You’re the agent for your digital identity, the manager for your connected content. If you get upset at the idea of identity theft, you should be livid at the notion that someone else will make money off your personal data. And if you still don’t believe me, wait until you see how things will look in the near future.