Data Transparency: An Problem Older Than Facebook

With big data collection emerging on the global stage as one of the most polarizing modern trends, a lot of people seem to be looking at the potential benefits and negatives myopically.

Data goes beyond what you see and share on Facebook or what you type into a search bar. Data is collected everywhere, for a limitless variety of purposes. Take Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) as an example. They’re a nonprofit that takes international charitable programs and rigorously evaluates them through randomized controlled trials (RCTs) – the same method used in medical trials.

Building a Better World With Data

IPA is the global leader in the niche nonprofit sector of gathering data on programs and influencing policy accordingly. But they hit an unexpected snag – other data-gathering nonprofits and academic institutions.

In order to establish external validity for a study’s outcome, this study has to be replicated in different conditions. The good news? A lot of these studies have been done before, in other countries with other populations, satisfying the requirement of external validity. The bad news? This data is not available.

There is no universal repository for data like this. In fact, it’s common practice to withhold your data from other researchers. The reason is simple: academics who got an academic paper published don’t want other academics taking their data, scrutinizing it, and contesting their outcomes.

A Solution in Data Transparency

One of the main issues that contributes to people not trusting data collecting is a total lack of transparency in what companies are collecting, how they’re using this data, and most importantly, who they share that data with. But we can’t blame companies entirely. This culture of not sharing data and treating it as private has been around way before the internet. Potentially life-saving datasets have been locked away in ivory towers for decades.

And that’s what has become normalized. Take Steve Ballmer’s new project USAfacts.org – it’s a site that shows where our tax dollars go to. It’s one of those ideas that’s so simple, once you start perusing it you’re flabbergasted that it never existed before. Taxes have been collected from the American people since before they were American, in the 1760’s. And now a website that shows us where our money has been going, started in 2017, is revolutionary? There’s something wrong there.

We Need a Change in Our Culture

So when people pay taxes every year for nearing three centuries without knowing dollar-for-dollar where the money is going, you can understand why we flip out when Facebook knows when we’re happy or not, or when Google knows we’re late for work and the best route to take. We’ve become used to being in the dark, and the light can be scary.

When you take international economic development and the revenue stream that provides the bulwark for our nation’s stability, digital ad targeting is a pretty small issue. But our fear is understandable. And so is these companies’ reluctance to share their data. This is the main obstacle to letting big data do what it should be doing in marketing, development, taxation, everything.

Desensitize Us – We’re Asking For It.

One of the current buzzwords around digital marketing and products is “democratization”. I find that’s hard to defend when the same companies that are democratizing the investing process, say, are also collecting data about us that they keep hidden from us. The publics sometimes seemingly irrational distrust of data collection is entirely rational. We don’t know what they’re doing with it.

If Facebook wants to collect data that will enable marketers to target emotionally vulnerable youths, then they should tell us, and also let us know that the ways in which this data is leveraged will be closely monitored by X, Y, and Z methods. I guarantee the public will be far more amenable to it.

We all know that countless amounts of data are being collected about our online and offline activities. So, to the major tech companies out there, don’t act like we don’t know. That’s why we don’t trust you. And we’re not wrong.