Good Data: An Optimist's Guide to Our Digital Future

"I have to disclose, first of all, that this is by a colleague of mine here at the Bennett Institute , Sam Gilbert. It’s a very healthy counterbalance to the ‘surveillance capitalism’ trope that has become so popular. The underlying reality is that there are pros and cons of this new digital data economy in which we find ourselves. There’s a genuine trade-off between the degree of privacy that we might want in an ideal world and the goods and services that can be created for us using the information based on data. Sam Gilbert was one of the co-founders of a very successful online insurance company and was responsible for a lot of the use of data in marketing that they deployed. He’s done a lot of subsequent research. The point about data is that it’s not useful in itself, it’s useful for the information it gives us that we can act on, or that allows us to do things differently, in order to give us better outcomes. Quite often things that are useful require different sources of data to be brought together. To give you a pandemic related example, if I take my temperature, it’s only useful information to me if I know what the population average is, so I know what’s normal. In current circumstances, if I have a temperature that might also be useful information for other people. So there are these positive spillovers of data. At the same time, I’ve got reasonable expectations of privacy. Completely understandably, I might not want people to know many details about my health. These are the kinds of trade-offs that we’re trying to navigate in this world and yet the surveillance capitalism idea has made a lot of people just think it’s terrible that we’re sharing data at all. “The point about data is that it’s not useful in itself, it’s useful for the information it gives us that we can act on” If you think back to the start of the pandemic, there was a fuss about whether the NHS app to track people’s contacts, could actually have private information centralised and shared in the government database. That’s incredibly useful if you want to do a track and trace operation, and it’s what the physical track and trace operation does: it asks people about their personal contacts and follows them up. But because the data privacy debate has got to where it has in terms of surveillance, the government was not able to do that on the app and had to use the Google and Apple version, with embedded privacy. It’s all very decentralised. You alone will know if you’ve been near somebody who’s tested positive and they’ve reported it. But that’s much more limited in use when it comes to containing a pandemic, which is all about spillovers between people. So you can reasonably debate whether we got to the right point in that trade-off. That’s what the book is about. It’s about opening up that debate and saying it’s not all one-sided. Using data in all kinds of ways can help address either public policy problems or business problems, or help businesses come up with new ideas. The potential is very wide. But, if we’re going to tap into that potential, we need to have a clear set of protocols about what data could be used when and by whom. There are certainly examples, like children in so-called ‘troubled families.’ If you can join up health data, school data, police data and social services data effectively, you can see that might help address all kinds of problems—social problems, inequalities—and help children at risk. But, equally understandably, there would be concern about anybody who got tagged with that label. Who would know that about them? How long would it follow them as they lived through their lives? Would that be a permanent digital fingerprint or could it be forgotten? There’s a lot of quite intricate policy detail to discuss. I find the surveillance capitalism argument very unsophisticated: it ignores the detail. That’s the argument. I’m a bit less confident because it depends very much on the governance arrangements that we set in place, and they’re just not there yet. We’re only just starting this debate."