What possibilities and challenges do we face in the age of big data?

This course explores the positive impacts of big data on society and ethical issues such as privacy through its definition, benefits, and applications in various fields.

 

Big data has enormous potential, as evidenced by the fact that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are among the top 10 largest companies in the world in terms of market capitalization based solely on digital data. In fact, in the healthcare sector, Google predicted the flu pandemic much faster and more accurately than U.S. health authorities, simply by looking at Americans’ Google search history, an area where no research had been conducted. U.S. police have also built a platform by analyzing crime data (time, rate, and location of crimes), which has led to predictive stakeouts that have significantly reduced crime rates in their states. As you can see, big data is having a powerful impact on many fields, including healthcare, society, education, and business, heralding the arrival of a new era of big data.
But first, let’s look at the definition of big data. The book “Big Data World” defines big data as data that is larger than a certain capacity, and another book “Big Data” defines it at length as “data generated in the digital environment that is massive in scale, short in frequency, and large in size, including not only numerical data, but also text and image data. The IDC market research firm defines big data as the vast amount of data that has purely economic value. As you can see, the meaning and value of big data can change depending on who defines it, how you look at it, and the context in which it is being utilized. In order to understand the various values of big data, let’s first look at the advantages of big data and how it is being utilized in society.
The invention of new scientific tools has enabled some of the biggest breakthroughs in the history of science. The invention of the telescope led to tremendous advances in astronomy, and the microscope opened up new paradigms in biology and chemistry by revealing the existence of cells and atoms. The invention of these new scientific tools revolutionized thinking by allowing us to see the unseen with our own eyes. This is where we can see the benefits of big data and its future role. Big data records and analyzes many small actions and events that we miss in our daily lives, making it possible to observe the unseen with our own eyes. Also, unlike scientific tools before it, big data is cross-disciplinary, which means that it will bring about positive changes in society as a whole.
Social science has contributed to analyzing many social phenomena and establishing many theories. However, the social science research methods that are currently used to analyze them – surveys, direct observation, and aptitude tests – are decades or centuries old. Furthermore, these methods are subject to interpretation by the researcher and have obvious limitations in scale. MIT researchers have developed a sociometer, a sensor that can precisely record social phenomena, to analyze various human behaviors. A typical example is the ‘instant dating experiment’, which was able to predict the success of a date with a high probability by analyzing data collected from social signals without referring to the content of the conversation. In addition, it has become possible to objectively analyze previously impossible studies such as salary negotiations and corporate culture based on a large amount of data.
As shown above, big data creates new value by analyzing each individual and collecting information to enable research that was previously impossible. However, recording all of an individual’s characteristics, behaviors, etc. is an ethical issue related to privacy. In fact, a large supermarket in the United States used search data to send pregnancy products and coupons to a high school girl. The father was offended and called to complain, but the company later apologized after learning of his daughter’s pregnancy. The case of a big data company finding out about a daughter’s pregnancy highlights not only privacy concerns, but also the ethical issue of a company learning about something as important as a pregnancy before the family.
These privacy concerns are morally troubling and are a major impediment to technology development. There have been many efforts to integrate an individual’s medical records to prevent unnecessary or duplicate prescriptions and tests and to provide better customized healthcare services, but they have all been blocked by privacy laws. For example, Korea’s SK Group tried to start a medical revolution, but it was canceled due to restrictions in the law. On the other hand, the U.S. and China have changed their attitudes and are actively pursuing open data policies and precision medicine plans to lead the world in personalized medicine. However, the extent to which data should be released and how much permission should be given is still a big social issue in each country.
The first solution to this privacy concern was data shadowing, which is the process of obscuring the identity of the data subject. However, even if names are removed, there are still problems with this method, as a large amount of information about an individual can be easily inferred. To solve this problem, Alex Sendy Pentland took a different approach: he argued that personal data should be made available, but that data providers and users should be able to agree on its use first. Based on this, he advocated three principles: “Prior notice and informed consent,” “Individuals have the right to control their data,” and “Data should be aggregated when sent to third parties. By aggregating data, he means gathering people with similar characteristics into a specific group so that no specific individual can be inferred from the data, and analyzing and utilizing only the group’s data. In fact, the UK’s big data policy, the MIDATA policy, is based on similar logic and has received positive social response.
Today, the use of big data is becoming more abundant and powerful, and it is becoming the “hot word” of the 21st century. Whether it’s building an intelligent transportation system by collecting data from vehicles on the road to prevent accidents and eliminate traffic jams, or using physiological data from newborn babies to prevent potentially dangerous situations in advance, big data is helping us do things that were never possible before. However, in order for big data to provide better services, the ethical issues that arise in the process of utilizing each individual’s information need to be improved as a society, and this is currently the most actively debated issue. In the future, if good policies to protect personal information are proposed and social consensus is reached, big data will contribute to a better life for humans and bring beneficial changes to society as a whole.