Summary of the Talk
In a Ted Talk given by Tijmen Schephe, he explains that data is not the new gold but the new oil. He also explains how there are definitely people benefiting from the data as they are paying for it to be collected, cleaned, analyzed, and acted upon, and most of the time that isn’t you. He emphasizes the fact that you should be careful with data and what you provide it. The even scarier thing is that this field is extremely untransparent and you should be careful of that. The example that he gives is every time you press the “Allow” button on an application you are granting that company access to whatever they want. Which at its heart is data. To further prove this he found a random member of the audience and a project that he has been working on, a national birthday calendar – it collects data about you and profiles the best birthday gifts, and posts them on the site to make sure that you don’t get any bad birthday gifts again – he was able to find ample personal information about that guy!
My Thoughts
The thing that caught my eye the most was probably the fact that every time I press the allow button I am giving away data to the people that want it to create a profile about me. I remember how many times I and everyone around me hit the “allow” or “agree” button so now I really curious to see what profile they have on me. Another reason why this talk intrigued my curiosity is that during the talk Schepasked a random person in the audience for their name and by using his national birthday calendar he found a lot of his personal information and only stopped reading to not undermine his privacy, not due to any lack of information. Everything from his address to name, to what his personality is, to his email preferences! Let that sink in for a minute just by getting a random person’s name and typing it into the software they were able to find his email preferences! This experiment for me really contextualized how much information about everyone is out there without us even knowing due to the lack of transparency in this field. On a brighter note, there has been a push in recent years for more transparency when it comes to things like this. But most of the industry is still very much in very untransparent when it comes to these things.
The Reason
The reason for all of this – money, this brings us back to the point that Schepput made earlier, there will always be someone paying for this data to be collected and used so they must always benefit from it even if it means less transparency. There are insurance companies willing to give you a discount if you allow them to track where you are going and how you are driving. Think about it, if companies are willing to give up guaranteed profits for a little bit of your information then it must be incredibly valuable.
Conclusion
They say data is the new gold but I think Schepput is better. Data isn’t the new gold, it’s the new oil. This is because while data definitely does have some benefits, it will always have a bad side to it. This Is why we should all be careful when on the internet. And make sure you look at what you are agreeing to before you press the “agree” or “accept” button otherwise you might just become the next victim of the new oil.