In this day and age we cannot argue that the amount data is rapidly increasing. More and more companies are becoming data driven, and who can argue with them, data equals money these days. But also people are becoming more data driven each day. You can check how much you’ve walked, how long you have been sitting, where you were last year and how many “friends” and how many people “like” your pictures. Everything you do and everything have is information, and this information is data, data which can be analysed.
Image: Volume of data/information created, captured, copied, and consumed worldwide from 2010 to 2025
To not make use all this data would be a waste, right? We can improve a lot of aspects of our society using the data on our lives. We can decrease cost of all the human errors in the world, make supply chains more efficient, provide people with information to improve their lives, live more healthy and make sustainable decisions and above all, connect people who can help one another. These are mere examples of the possibilities. Once we know how to use all the data that we create efficiently, improvements are on the horizon and the world would become a better place!
Healing and improving the world with data, sounds wonderful right? Let us document and analyse everything and everyone. But of course, just like with everything in the world, there is another side to the story. That fact that almost everybody owns a phone these days means that everybody is generating data on their lives. Data on you is being generated and stored every day on where you are, where you go, whom you talk to, what you watch what you are interested in. Your private life is no longer private. And of course, I am not assuming that there is someone watching your data and looking at what you are doing, this boring job is for the algorithms we generate. But these algorithms are getting increasingly better in ”knowing” you, and influencing what you see and do.
Next to that, this huge and increasing amount of data has to stored in big energy-consuming datacenters. And the increasing amount of data will mean that the need for these datacenters will rise as well. Is this huge amount of energy really worth what it is being used for? Storing all this data on everybody, storing YouTube video’s and everybody’s google searches?
I believe the in the best of both worlds, a data driven society, with useful and valuable data. Data that can be private and regulated, so that there is enough and useful information to help data driven decision making, but respecting everybody’s privacy and not generating and storing data that has no significant use to improving this world.
This is an ambiguous statement, wanting more and less data at the same time and increasing privacy but also collecting personal data to improve lives. I’m not stating that there is a perfect solution for this two sided subject, but with a bit of attention for the positive and negative sides of the increasing amount of data, we as a society might be able to make use of the benefits and decrease and limit the disadvantages.
References:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data-created/
https://www.bbntimes.com/technology/the-dark-side-of-big-data
