Data for the People

Every day, as you browse the Internet and carry your mobile phone, you create and share data about yourself. This data of the people and by the people is the most important economic resource of the twenty-first century, as important as oil. And as with oil, the real value comes from refining that raw material – whether at giant multinationals like Google, Facebook, and Amazon or smaller outfits developing techniques to identify shopping habits, job productivity, or wellbeing from our digital traces.

This lecture will show that it's misguided to fight for a naive conception of privacy or anonymity; that would mean giving up many of the products and services you've come to depend on. Instead, you must take an active role in extracting value from your data, especially as more data comes from social networks and sensors. To ensure your data is being used for you and not against you, you must demand a seat at the controls of the data refineries.

Weigend argues that every refinery should provide you with a data "hygiene" dashboard -- including measures of expected risk and return on data shared. He outlines five tools that reward data creators with more decision-making power: the right to export data, the right to amend data, the right to blur data, the ability to "dial" personalization up and down, and the ability to see how changing inputs affects outputs.

Andreas Weigend teaches at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, where he directs the Social Data Lab, and speaks at corporate events and top conferences around the globe. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford University after studying in Germany and Cambridge, UK. He lives in San Francisco and Shanghai. He currently researches the future of big data, social-mobile technologies, and consumer behavior. He studies people and the data they create and advises companies that want to embrace the new reality of social data.

The Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering is celebrating its 25th Anniversary this academic year. To celebrate this, the department has organized a conference on the 15 of June. Andreas Weigend will be one of the speakers at this conference.