In previous post you can learn about four types of data and
its problems that professor of Computer Science and
Engineering at Washington University Pedro Domingos highlights in his book “The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate
Learning Machine Will Remake our World”. Professor Domingos also
offers a solution for organizing and keeping that data.
We need a new type of company that will play the same role
for our data as a bank for our savings. Banks do not steal and should invest
investments wisely. Today, many companies offer to consolidate our data
somewhere in the cloud storage, but they are still very far from the level of
personal data banks. Providers of cloud services are trying to tie us to
themselves - and this is impossible (imagine that you opened an account with
Bank of America and are not sure whether it will be possible in the future to
transfer funds to another bank).
Companies of a new type, as professor imagines them, will
provide several functions for the subscription fee. First, they will anonymize
our interactions in the electronic world, conducting them through their own
servers, and accumulate them, as well as similar actions by other users.
Secondly, they will store in one place data collected during our life. Thirdly,
they will form a complete model of our personality and our world and constantly
update it. Fourthly - to apply this model on our behalf, within its abilities,
always doing exactly what we would have done ourselves. The main obligation of
the company before us is never to use our data and our model contrary to our
interests. The guarantee will not be one hundred percent - after all, we
ourselves are not immune from doing anything to ourselves in any way harmful.
Nevertheless, the viability of the company will depend on the implementation of
the agreement to the same extent as the survival of the bank - from the safety
of our money, so we can trust them the way we trust banks today.
Such companies can quickly become one of the most expensive
in the world. As Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic magazine points out, today our
profiles can be bought for half a cent or even cheaper, but for the online
advertising industry the user's value is approaching $1200 per year. A piece of
information about us, available to Google, costs about $20, Facebook has $5 and
so on. Add to this the fragments that no one else has, and the fact that the
whole weight of the sum of parts - the personality model based on all our data,
is much better than a thousand models built from separate pieces.
Of course, some existing companies will happily take our
"digital personality". For example, Google. Sergey Brin wants Google
to become the "third hemisphere of your brain", and some of the
company's acquisitions are probably related to how successfully streams of user
data complement the company's own flow. But, despite the initial advantages,
Google and Facebook, for example, are not very suitable for the role of our
digital home, because there is a conflict of interest. They earn their living
by targeting advertising, so they will somehow balance the interests of users
and advertisers. Domingos asks rhetorical question: “You, probably, do not allow
one of the hemispheres to be not entirely loyal to you? Then why give it to the
third hemisphere?”
A potential threat can come from government bodies if they
have the right to claim our data or even prophylactically put us behind bars.
To prevent this, the company storing data should encrypt it, and the key should
be at our disposal (now it is already possible to perform calculations on
encrypted data without decrypting it). Or we can keep everything on our hard
drive at home, and the company will simply provide the software for rent.
Privacy is only one aspect of the broader issue of providing access
to information, and if we focus on it at the expense of the whole, we run the
risk of reaching wrong conclusions. For example, laws that prohibit the use of
data for any purpose, except for the originally envisaged, are extremely
short-sighted.
Companies
that store our digital identity and data protection associations, in
professor’s opinion, will determine the picture of working with data in the
future. Today, most people do not realize how much data they provide and with
what costs and benefits this can be due to them. Companies, for their part, are
happy to maintain the status quo and work behind the scenes. Domingos concludes
that sooner or later such a system will collapse. It is better to raise
awareness now and give everyone the right to choose whether to share data, and
if so, how and where.
For more article follow this link: http://haneenalansari.blogspot.com/2017/04/what-is-future-of-digital-marketing.html
