Big Data at the Festival of Research
Event on Big Data and Privacy
On April 25 the Public-Private Platform and the Big Data Forum invited to an event on Big Data, in connection with the yearly national Festival of Research [Forskningens Døgn]. The room was filled to its capacity despite the early hour with an audience including civil servants, researchers, private sector employees and students, all present to discuss the question ‘How are different amounts of data in practice translated into analysis and visualisation, when many aren’t aware of the fact that they cannot control the digital traces they leave behind?’
The seminar was moderated by associate professor and cluster facilitator of the PPP cluster Internet, Business and Governance, Mikkel Flyverbom. According to Flyverbom potentiality and fear live side by side when it comes to using and navigating in the world of big data. He argued that because something that used to take a different form now takes a data form, the emergence of new characteristics of knowledge and behaviour. Experts argue that big data is a more reliable form of knowledge compared to interviews and other data methods. Data can be seen as a new form of the element. Following new opportunities, also new concerns are appearing together with big data. For instance it can be asked: does big data decrease the possibility of a private life?
Anders Koed Madsen, assistant professor at Aalborg University, gave in his presentation ‘Behind the task of Big Data visualizations’, insight into how big data technologies convert our behaviour. He sees that data produced on the internet is shaped through a visualisation process of five elements: data production, storage, organisation, distribution and analysis. With the use of algorithms as a set of logically defined instructions it can be indicated how a specific problem can be solved and explained. Anders explained how the UN for instance find danger signals by visualizing big data through an algorithm that takes tweets and transform it through a colour coding system.
Pernille Tranberg, journalist, former research fellow and the author of several books about the Internet, data and privacy, reflected in her presentation on how we build what she refers to as data self-defence. According to Pernille, big data marks costumers as the ‘weak’ in society – which is why we must be even better at protecting ourselves. In the US big data knowledge frames citizens’ health insurance options. With records of what people ‘like’ one can obtain extremely sensitive data. Having a private life today is not effortless, but with small reminders and techniques you can hide little things of everyday life, said Pernille who see a future where it will be a business model to present a strong privacy profile, just as we have seen with CSR.
Read much more and download the presentations here [In Danish].