Privacy & Surveillance In A Big Data Age With Kenneth Cukier

In this episode, I got to speak with Ken Cukier. Ken is an award winning journalist, a book author and a keynote speaker. He's the coauthor of Big Data: A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think with Viktor Mayer-Schnberger. It was a New York Times bestseller and translated into over 20 languages and sold over 1 million copies worldwide. It won the National Library of Chinas Wenjin Book Award and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. Kenn co-authored a follow-on book, called "Learning with Big Data : The Future of Education". I got the chance to speak to Kenn about big data and whether the technologies are going to be used for surveillance or for good.

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FOLLOW KENNETH CUKIER, Journalist
➡️ Twitter:  https://twitter.com/kncukier


KENNETH'S PUBLICATION
Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, coauthored with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger


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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:48 Kenn Cukier's Introduction
• 1:06 Artificial Intelligence
• 2:09 Digital Technologies
• 3:01 Being Manipulated
• 3:26 Raw Data
• 4:30 Retina Scans & Data
• 5:22 The Benefits That AI Can Bring Society
• 5:55 State Surveillance
• 6:35 Benefits of Data
• 7:20 Privacy & Technology
• 7:54 Control
• 8:23 End

Transcript

Ina O'Murchu: 0:04

Hi, and you're very welcome to my podcast show. In this episode, I got to speak with Ken Cukier. Ken is an award winning journalist, a book author and a keynote speaker. He's the coauthor of Big Data: A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think with Viktor Mayer-Schnberger. It was a New York Times bestseller and translated into over 20 languages and sold over 1 million copies worldwide. It won the National Library of Chinas Wenjin Book Award and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year. Kenn coauthored a follow-on book, called Learning with Big

Data: 0:35

The Future of Education. I got the chance to speak to Kenn about big data and whether the technologies are going to be used for surveillance or for good.

Kenn Cukier: 0:48

Hi, I'm Kenn Cukier, I'm a senior editor at The Economist and I'm the coauthor of a book Big Data: A Revolution That Transforms How We Live, Work, and Think.

Ina O'Murchu: 0:57

Can you talk about privacy Kenn, can you tell us what stage are we at? Are they? Are they surveillance technologies? Or are they helpful technologies?

Kenn Cukier: 1:06

Such a good question, because I think the question of privacy, at least in my mind is changing considerably because of Artificial Intelligence. And that's in two different directions, in one direction is well understood, one direction is absolutely not. So what is well known? Well, privacy and the public sphere versus sort of internet private sphere has been an issue for several centuries, not much earlier than that, of course, it's much it's considered a modern concept, even though there was the internet sphere, but not so much. If you walk around, for example, the bedrooms in Versailles where the king and queen was asleep, you saw that it's almost any closet public gallery, right where the where the bed was. And so you can imagine that it was hard to actually find sort of intimacy or privacy in in the period you know, prior to the enlightenment. I don't know if this link there with you like. Probably In fact, we could talk a lot more about that. But to get our potted history very quickly, of course, privacy became a big thing because of Digital Technologies. That's when the time the community that cared about privacy, post World War Two, and carry about Digital Technologies sort of merged together. And we created also the OECD privacy rules, that and personal information and the data protection regime that we live with right now, who's largely good, except sort of the internet came around. At first, it seemed to be a flagrant violation, and abuse of privacy. But for reasons that people didn't really think about from first principles, for the last 20 years, we've had privacy advocates and arms breathlessly complaining about Behavioral Targeting, which frankly, I think, no reasonable person and we can't even see in terms of the real field revealed preference of ordinary web surfers nobody cared about, right. It just didn't really matter to people that they're being tracked. Now, What they didn't care about was that they were being tracked and they're being manipulated and that information was being misused. The Cambridge Analytica story. But what happened theory, but never practiced, up until 2016 became practice. We cared about the misuse of data. I don't think we care about how to go and get, you know, jacket following us all around the web from every website that we visited. It was an annoyance. It was a nuisance, but it wasn't really, it wasn't harmful to us in any way, in the same way that we think our democracy is falling apart, right. And so because of things like Cambridge Analytica, now, AI comes in, and there's, I think the issue swings in two different directions that people haven't really thought a lot about. And this is where my thoughts are going right now. The first one is the way Artificial Intelligence systems work because it needs all of the data, the Raw Data, just you can't you can't know at the outset. What are gonna be the relevant variables in high dimensional states that will be, will reach the output that you want. For example, we know that the famous research in, in ophthalmology that came out about a year ago, where you could have, a where you can look at the retina of patients and identify their gender based on the retina, something that an ophthalmologist cannot do. But that the AI system can do to about a 95 degree accuracy on 5% accuracy, which is just weird, like nobody even knew there was anything that had this sort of feature that showed sex in a retina scan. And if you can do it there, then you can imagine, right, why don't we just take a look at some cell samples in my in my bloodstream and identify cancer 20 years l ke o this part cular or an sm e can pr te t, e can p ev nt t ow by aking these teps. hat s the great p omise of A t at w wi l et o the cer ainly there there efo e us. B ca se e c n u e a l th da a a l t e raw dat, the pr blem, p ivacy ules, inhe ently circums rib d the mo nt of infor ati n ut o da a y u c n u e and ac ually li it o the sm llest a ou t. I eve say they hould thr w o t the data onc it s ut o put p imary p rpo e ha been fulf Problem ball oint 9, hole ig ata ra s hat ou ever ealize he rimary urpose ou ou, ou enefit rom hese yriad f econdary urposes o hich he ish an e ut hat ou nly o in he uture. o ou're etter ff ending ll he ata oday. kay. o hat's he irst hing hat ould uggest hat rivacy aw s estricting f he reat enefits hat I an ring ociety. hat's he ssue. e ot a emedy ause hat's idiculous ike e ant he enefits rom ociety. e ant o ure ancer efore he ancer ill ill s. Swings to the other direction, AI is in privacy, the states will become a lot harder. And you can just replace things with facial recognition. But that's the Karen Nicole line for every other way in which we're leaving a danger tricks, a little shadow that changes the fundamental economics really, of how we can identify people at all times. Before it was just really difficult to there was like a stickiness there, but it was it was it was it we accepted how the state could sort of surveil us, because there were these inherent limitations to what it could do. Right? So if you want it to look at people, you had to be very aker, c eaper photog aph, you coul hav co s who could eturn, r mem er the im ges of eop e, you wou d, yo mig t hav had a CCTV tel vision c mer s, b t they c ul n't e een at al t me. o it's ma nly t see crime afte wards Th re was we a cept d ome o these techno ogies, ec use e kn w th t they eren t that eff cti e. ut n w t at ou can a tual y have erfect infor ation, erfect eca l, a d have e eryon eing tr cked to a pe fect de ree, very fa e of bar ode for so rce, o to s ea. It defin tely ch nge the econ mic an the capab li y o any asym et y of ower be wee the tat an the indivi ual. That o me sn't uite alar in, in So on one hand, I think privacy law is denying human freedom. And it's and it's, and we should add the ability to make the world a better place, we should loosen privacy laws, so that we can get a better set of data. On the other hand, in certain other areas can be used not just a little collection of Ambiq theory or whether hypothetical practice of it in the case of planning, official recognition, but it's going to be voice recognition, it's going to be probably sensors that can pick up our genomes, or sort of hormonal makeup and biochemistry is that distance of who we are in a crowd. That's gonna come to, um, that I think we need to really control against the for the sake of human freedom or very sort of, mid 20th century, fear that I have, the fear of totalitarian and authoritarian control and the world was shifting in that direction. Answers to how we're gonna be back. So we better get some good answers because this is a real classical matter of human freedom.

Ina O'Murchu: 8:23

Thanks for listening and checking out my podcast. You can head over to Spotify and find my podcast there. Or on Apple iTunes, subscribe to my podcast on my website, you can head over to www.inam.io for further details.