Big Data:A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think

How can we spot a disease 24 hours before symptoms appear? How can we predict which manholes in New York City may explode next year? Can we really identify criminals before they have committed a crime? Welcome to “big data” — the idea that we can do with a vast amount of data things that we simply couldn’t when we had less. The change in scale leads to a change in state. It upends the nature of business, how government works and the way we live, from healthcare to education. Big data will even change how we think about the world and our place in it. As we collect and crunch more data, the good news is that we can do extraordinary things: fight disease, reduce climate change, and unlock mysteries of science. The bad news is that it raises a host of worries for which society is unprepared. What does it mean if big data denies us a bank loan or considers us unfit for a surgical operation, but we can’t learn the explicit reasons because the variables that went in were so myriad and complex? How do you regulate an algorithm? Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute / Oxford University. In addition to his recent international bestseller Big Data (co-authored with Kenn Cukier), Mayer-Schönberger has published eight books (including the awards-winning Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age with Princeton University Press) and is the author of over a hundred articles and book chapters on the information economy. After successes in the International Physics Olympics and the Austrian Young Programmers Contest, Mayer-Schönberger studied in Salzburg, at Harvard and at the London School of Economics. In 1986 he founded Ikarus Software, a company focusing on data security and developed the Virus Utilities, which became the best-selling Austrian software product. He was voted Top-5 Software Entrepreneur in Austria in 1991 and Person of the Year for the State of Salzburg in 2000.Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Big Data: A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think, lecture, ICI Berlin, 28 April 2014 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e140428

Regulatory Web: Free Speech and the Global Information Infrastructure, A

National restrictions of freedom of speech on the nascent global information infrastructure are commonplace not only in the United States, but also around the globe. Individual nations, each intent upon preserving what they perceive to be within the perimeters of their national interests, seek to regulate certain forms of speech because of content that is considered reprehensible or offensive to national well-being or civic virtue. The fact that this offending speech is technologically dispersed instantaneously to millions of potential recipients strengthens the impetus to regulate.... Activists at both ends of the spectrum disregard an integral aspect of the global composition of the Net. Those who advocate unfettered Net communication and those who espouse some form of national Net regulation are similarly constrained in the pursuit of their objectives by the very structure of the information infrastructure. It is the global aspect of the information infrastructure that shapes the debate on freedom of speech and limits absolutists and regulators at the same time. The nature of this conflict and its potential resolution will be outlined in this Article. Therefore, assuming that national policy makers will not want to cede their authority to regulate the information infrastructure, we will suggest a mechanism by which those who elect to regulate speech can begin to deliberate about this objective in a structured, principled, and internationally acceptable manner

Notice and Consent in a World of Big Data

Nowadays individuals are often presented with long and complex privacy notices routinely written by lawyers for lawyers, and are then requested to either ‘consent’ or abandon the use of the desired service. The over-use of notice and consent presents increasing challenges in an age of ‘Big Data’. These phenomena are receiving attention particularly in the context of the current review of the OECD Privacy Guidelines. In 2012 Microsoft sponsored an initiative designed to engage leading regulators, industry executives, public interest advocates, and academic experts in frank discussions about the role of individual control and notice and consent in data protection today, and alternative models for providing better protection for both information privacy and valuable data flows in the emerging world of Big Data and cloud computing

Après le Moment Constitutionnel : la régulation des mondes virtuels 2.0

Les mondes virtuels offrent une perspective fascinante sur les dynamiques de régulation entre juridiction en compétition. D’une manière plus générale se pose la question des effets de ces jeux sur les régulateurs du monde réel et les dizaines de millions d’utilisateurs. Cet article postule que les fournisseurs de mondes virtuels (en particuliers les dominants), devrait céder une part du contrôle (dans une certaine mesure). Ainsi les décideurs publics du monde réel se retrouveront en partie dans le choix performatifs des plates-formes monopolistiques, et ce à un niveau supérieur de régulation, mais aussi dans une certaine complexité conceptuelle.Virtual worlds offer a fascinating perspective on regulatory dynamics between competing jurisdictions. More importantly, how these dynamics play out has vast consequences for real world regulators and tens of millions of users. I suggest that virtual world providers (especially dominant ones) may want to cede control (at least to an extent), while real world policy makers will find themselves in a replay of injecting choice into platform monopolies at higher levels of not just regulatory, but also conceptual complexity

Regime Change? Enabling Big Data through Europe’s New Data Protection Regulation

The European Union has just passed the most comprehensive overhaul of its privacy laws in two decades. The so-called General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) brings numerous changes. In this Article we look at how the GDPR will impact, enable or restrict the use of Big Data in Europe. We look at three distinct privacy aspects of Big Data: while collection sees a tightening of regulation through the GDPR, the principles of purpose limitation and retention minimization offer a mixed view, including a rather surprising avenue that could permit Big Data applications at a much larger scale than today. We conclude in evaluating whether this exception, that provides some room for manoeuver for member states, will be sufficient for Big Data to flourish, and what issues remain to be addresse

Zynga’s FarmVille, social games, and the ethics of big data mining

The increasing necessity of engaging in social interaction through online commercial providers such as Facebook, alongside the ability of providers to extract, aggregate, analyse, and commercialise the data and metadata such activities produce, have attracted considerable attention amongst the media and academic commentators alike. While much of the attention has been focused on the data mining of social networking services such as Facebook, it is equally important to recognise the widespread adoption of large-scale data mining practices in a number of realms, including social games such as the well-known FarmVille and its sequels, created by Zynga. The implicit contract that the public who use these services necessarily engage in requires them to trade information about their friends, their likes, their desires, and their consumption habits in return for their participation in the service. This paper will critically explore the realm of social games utilising Zynga as a central example, with a view to examine the practices, politics, and ethics of data mining and the inherent social media contradiction. In determining whether this contradiction is accidental or purposeful, this paper will ask, in effect, whether Zynga and other big data miners behind social games are entrepreneurial heroes, more sinister FarmVillains, or whether it is possible at all to draw a line between the two? In doing so, Zynga’s data mining approach and philosophy provide an important indicator about the broader integration of data analytics into a range of everyday activities

Photo editing: Enhancing social media images to reflect appearance ideals

Many of the images used in traditional forms of mass media have been modified to portray unrealistic and idealised beauty characteristics. Further to this, members of the general public have now begun to digitally enhance their own pictures for social media posts, in order to fulfil these often unattainable standards. Ella Guest explores the impact exposure to idealised images of peers may have on health and wellbein

Reflections on deploying distributed consultation technologies with community organisations

In recent years there has been an increased focus upon developing platforms for community decision-making, and an awareness of the importance of handing over civic platforms to community organisations to oversee the process of decision-making at a local level. In this paper, we detail fieldwork from working with two community organisations who used our distributed situated devices as part of consultation processes. We focus on some of the mundane and often-untold aspects of this type of work: how questions for consultations were formed, how locations for devices were determined, and the ways in which the data collected fed into decision-making processes. We highlight a number of challenges for HCI and civic technology research going forward, related to the role of the researcher, the messiness of decision making in communities, and the ability of community organisations to influence how citizens participate in democratic processes