Large-scale GPS data is revealing how to respond effectively to
catastrophes, how to improve transport systems, and how new
diseases might spread.[6] But it also risks leaking personal
information without our knowledge, endangering our privacy and
even our safety.
In March 2018, the Observer newspaper reported that Cambridge
Analytica had secretly gathered data from tens of millions of
Facebook users, with the aim of building psychological profiles of US
and British voters.[7] Although the effectiveness of such profiling has
been disputed by statisticians,[8] the scandal eroded public trust in
technology firms. According to software engineer – and ex-physicist
- Yonatan Zunger, the story was a modern retelling of the ethical
debates that had already occurred in fields like nuclear physics or
medicine.[9] ‘The field of computer science, unlike other sciences,
has not yet faced serious negative consequences for the work its
practitioners do,’ he wrote at the time. As new technology appears,
we mustn’t forget the lessons that researchers in other fields have
already learned the hard way.
When ‘big data’ became a popular buzzword in the early twenty-
first century, the potential for multiple uses was a source of optimism.
The hope was that data collected for one purpose could help tackle
questions in other areas of life. A flagship example of this was
Google Flu Trends (GFT).[10] By analysing the search patterns of
millions of users, researchers suggested it would be possible to
measure flu activity in real-time, rather than waiting a week or two for
official US disease tallies to be published.[11] The initial version of
GFT was announced in early 2009, with promising results. However,
it didn’t take long for criticisms to emerge.
The GFT project had three main limitations. First, the predictions
didn’t always work that well. GFT had reproduced the seasonal
winter flu peaks in the US between 2003 and 2008, but when the
pandemic took off unexpectedly in spring 2009, GFT massively
underestimated its size.[12] ‘The initial version of GFT was part flu
detector, part winter detector,’ as one group of academics put it.[13]