Measuring Your Personality – Jonas Peters
We use many online services that we don’t pay for with money, but with our personal data. This type of exchange requires more rules
Translation: Diana Aurisch / Copy-editing: Tom Seidel
The internet is so large that it is possible to digitalise every sentence ever spoken by humans and save them all online as audio files. Every two days, as many photos are uploaded to social media services as there are people on the planet. Such comparisons give us a vague idea of the immense amounts of data we’re accruing. Germany recognised the dangers inherent in the accrual and storage of data early on, and since the 1970s has been dealing with the question of how to protect people from the misuse of their data – a subject irritatingly referred to as ‘data protection’. Is there really a revolution to speak of in this field?
What is new in this context is that our data have come to possess economic value for many firms. The quality of internet searches and of image and speech recognition functions has less to do with the underlying algorithms and much more to do with the quality of the data set available to the service. Service providers do not make much money from the actual services; instead, the services enable the providers to lure more users and, with them, their data. These data are then turned into money by the companies through the placement of advertising tailored to a user’s preferences. Even just a few ‘clicks’ on search results and a few ‘likes’ reveal a great deal about one’s personality. This has turned internet advertising into good business. Today, many of the most valuable companies on Earth own neither conventional energy resources nor manufacturing sites, but rather a large customer base with an immense data trove. We use many services that seem free at first glance, but we are actually ‘paying’ for them by offering up our personal data. Many researchers have been demanding for years that this hidden ‘exchange’ be made more transparent.* So far we only have two options: either accept all conditions or refuse to use a specific service. But what information are we prepared to offer for which kinds of services? We need rules that ensure that we always know which parts of our data are being used and for which purposes.
Jonas Peters is a mathematician and researcher at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. He joined the Junge Akademie in 2016.
*See, for example, the article by Thomas Hofmann and Bernhard Schölkopf, ‘Vom Monopol auf Daten ist abzuraten’ (‘A monopoly on data should be avoided’), published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 29 January 2015, and the article ‘The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data’, in The Economist from 6 May 2017.
