Rick Smolan: Can Big Data Change Who You Are?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT BIG THINK:

Smarter Faster™
Big Think is the leading source of expert-driven, actionable, educational content -- with thousands of videos, featuring experts ranging from Bill Clinton to Bill Nye, we help you get smarter, faster. S​ubscribe to learn from top minds like these daily. Get actionable lessons from the world’s greatest thinkers & doers. Our experts are either disrupting or leading their respective fields. ​We aim to help you explore the big ideas and core skills that define knowledge in the 21st century, so you can apply them to the questions and challenges in your own life.

Other Frequent contributors include Michio Kaku & Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Join Big Think Edge, to gain access to a world-class learning platform focused on building the soft skills essential to 21st century success. It features insight from many of the most celebrated and intelligent individuals in the world today. Topics on the platform are focused on: emotional intelligence, digital fluency, health and wellness, critical thinking, creativity, communication, career development, lifelong learning, management, problem solving & self-motivation.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Follow Big Think here:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[christech]

I agree with Rick Smolan. When we create a program we totally ignore the legal or the ethical side and how it may effect people in general! Our concentration focus on the level of accuracy and speed without considering the consequences as a result.

[siglerproductions]

Very interesting. Thanks to everyone at Big Think and everyone involved for bringing up subjects such as this.

[cohan]

THANK YOU! I myself have come to this conclusion a long time ago. Big data, as you call it, is an important and highly relevant part of our future. If it were to be available for everyone to see, the effect would probably be amazing beyond comprehension. I imagine that it would, in a personal way, be to general mentality as psychology is to the individual. Ignorance by small social groups would be washed away like the great biblical flood.

[rufuguru]

What you are referring to are medical contracts more closely associated with the Insurance companies and not the patients themselves. When you want data collected about your own medical history in the United States at least, by law, a hospital must give you a copy of your own medical file at a reasonable cost and with a consultation of the meaning of the file with a doctor if a patient demands it.

[rufuguru]

The data that the patients don't have access to is statistical data that includes private information about other patients and anyone authorized to view this data can't use the identifying information for anything without the explicit permission of a given patient.

[Inmatinus]

What I think is more messed up is that company's like google, facebook, twitter and maybe youtube? all the most popular websites and tools are also the biggest information traders. Not to speak of android phones.

Its basically a silent betrayal of privacy rights mixed in social pressure and consumption behavior. Thats why alternatives such as duckduckgo to the google engine has my heart's fullest support.

[luciddeception]

It depends ultimately. Some website (forums are a good example) simply do not have the equipment to store all data which has been entered into them, and will only hold data for a certain time until it has been inactive long enough to be deleted to free up server space for other newer data. Now I'm not saying FB works like that, but just because something was typed onto the Internet does not necessarily mean it is permanent.

[Dyslexic-Artist-Theory-on-Time]

This is an invitation to see an artist theory on the physics of light & time
Based on just two postulates
1 Is that the quantum wave particle function Ψ or probability function represents the forward passage of time itself with the future unfolding photon by photon
2 Is that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle ∆×∆p×≥h/4π that is formed by the w-function is the same uncertainty we have with any future event within our own ref-frame that we can interact with turning the possible into the actual!

[ichhabedich]

they say, the separation begint often beautifully with the bye, weill one expects big heart for all who think every gleichim good time, oh how beautiful, is the cradle is the people looking to live the Serene. thank her beautiful speaking here

[AutodidacticPhd]

While the term "own" may not technically apply to it, the way the rights to collected and encoded information work (who can withhold or grant access, whether you can charge money for it, how you go about duplicating or using duplicate info etc) come to something very nearly the same as de facto ownership... at least as far as any layman is going to be concerned. After all, some form of exclusive control of rights is also a prerequisite for something to be a viable business commodity.

[Paetaor]

Some of us have some idea but nobody has the full picture. I have been working on a project over the last year that works with social media data/big data.
It's a huge business and if I hear the word sentiment one more time I may snap.

[bagder]

"technology can be used for good or evil" case in point atomic energy: nuclear power plants produces lots electricity with little pollution, then you have atomic bombs with no benefit but destruction

[BigotesMcbuff]

Agreed, Big. In the end, for a company, the bottom line is everything. Far beyond your concerns, far beyond your rights and freedoms, far beyond the environment, etc. I remember watching some of Bill Gates' speeches about humanity needing to 'let go' of their fears of letting go of personal information, this is the result. People are used, bought and sold, allowed to suffer or die painfully or buried into poverty through the use of this data mining. Little of it is put to good use.

[juliomarco]

The point here is not that we want free data, but that we should be entitled to give our data or not, according to our own beliefs and personal choices, without risking death, injury or any unavoidable loss for not doing so.

If some business demands data for a pacemaker and will not install it if the data is not given, what they are doing, in fact, is to point a gun to the patient's heart and say "Hand me your data or I blow your chest!".

The data should be, at least, open to the patient.

[BorealSelfReliance]

The idea of pace maker's data being propitiatory and not being released to the patient who the device is installed in, is pretty messed up

[AutodidacticPhd]

I'm reasonably sure he was referring only to the US market, which has been rather slow to switch to cellphones for some reason,

[hurleygt]

Where is there an article about credit card companies looking at people's posts of rap music help determine credit scores? I can't find any on Google.

[numbakrunch]

The patient who was told he couldn't have his heartbeat data should have gone to the manufacturer's offices, taken a big dump on the lobby floor and said "Since you already own my heart, you can have this too! What else do you want?"

[rumayorjulio]

i would sign a petition for the gov to make them make our data private or something similar

[bigsexybear]

People truly have no idea how much of their "data" is being used, sold and mined. Private industry data mining is scarier than anything big government can do.