Data for the People
How to Make Our Post-Privacy Economy Work for You
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A long-time chief data scientist at Amazon shows how open data can make everyone, not just corporations, richer
Every time we Google something, Facebook someone, Uber somewhere, or even just turn on a light, we create data that businesses collect and use to make decisions about us. In many ways this has improved our lives, yet, we as individuals do not benefit from this wealth of data as much as we could. Moreover, whether it is a bank evaluating our credit worthiness, an insurance company determining our risk level, or a potential employer deciding whether we get a job, it is likely that this data will be used against us rather than for us.
In Data for the People, Andreas Weigend draws on his years as a consultant for commerce, education, healthcare, travel and finance companies to outline how Big Data can work better for all of us. As of today, how much we benefit from Big Data depends on how closely the interests of big companies align with our own. Too often, outdated standards of control and privacy force us into unfair contracts with data companies, but it doesn't have to be this way. Weigend makes a powerful argument that we need to take control of how our data is used to actually make it work for us. Only then can we the people get back more from Big Data than we give it.
Big Data is here to stay. Now is the time to find out how we can be empowered by it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Many readers are likely to be resistant to this book's underlying premise that "the time has come to recognize that privacy is nothing more than an illusion." Weigend, the onetime chief scientist of Amazon, certainly delineates, in familiar ways, how the "Internet of things," and the capacity to create, record, store and analyze data, can be beneficial. But some of his speculative future tools such as creating "trust coefficients" that tie one's reputation, in a measurable numeric way, to that of a friend come across as frighteningly Orwellian, and he provides no emotionally intelligent examination of the toll on human interactions. That obliviousness is also evident when Weigend wonders why people could feel more threatened by the unobtrusive surveillance capacities of a tool such as Google Glass than by a smartphone that can make similar audio and video recordings. Weigend's solution to concerns about the loss of privacy that everyone gets new rights to "data transparency and agency" comes across as both laudably idealistic and impractical.
