Technology implications of political trends
The tech industry has a broad range of political concerns. While I may complain that things have been a bit predictable in other respects, politics is having real and new(ish) technical consequences. In some cases, existing technology is clearly adequate to meet regulators’ and customers’ demands. Other needs look more like open research challenges.
1. Privacy regulations will be very different in different countries or regions. For starters:
- This is one case in which the European Union’s bureaucracy is working pretty well. It’s making rules for the whole region, and they aren’t totally crazy ones.
- Things are more chaotic in the English-speaking democracies.
- Authoritarian regimes are enacting anti-privacy rules.
All of these rules are subject to change based on:
- Genuine technological change.
- Changes in politicians’ or the public’s perceptions.
And so I believe: For any multinational organization that handles customer data, privacy/security requirements are likely to change constantly. Technology decisions need to reflect that reality.
2. Data sovereignty/geo-compliance is a big deal. In fact, this is one area where the EU and authoritarian countries such as Russia formally agree. Each wants its citizens’ data to be stored locally, so as to ensure adherence to local privacy rules.
For raw, granular data, that’s a straightforward — even if annoying — requirement to meet. But things get murkier for data that is aggregated or otherwise derived.
3. Data anonymization needs to be credibly and reliably solved. Reliable data anonymization, in principle, could moot multiple conflicts, including:
- The tension between data sovereignty and global analytics.
- The tension between medical research and health data privacy.
But doing so will be extremely hard.
- Consumer internet deanonymization is brutally effective.
- Birth date/zip code combinations come close to identifying people uniquely.
- So does the computer/browser configuration information that gets communicated to any website.
- Ordinary citizens are only beginning to realize how not-anonymous they really are.
- Mistrust of data-rich technology companies has recently exploded.
4. Transparency will be demanded, in multiple forms. For starters:
- The complexity and sophistication of data privacy regulation will naturally lead to demands that compliance be straightforwardly auditable.
- Those demands will come from regulators and consumers alike.
We more or less know how to do that part already.
But where things get really messy is in the area of “black box” algorithms. People are concerned about potentially-untrustworthy automated decisions in many areas, such as:
- Self-driving cars (which occasionally kill people).
- Junk-filled news feeds (which make democracy more difficult).
- Various “creepy” e-commerce behaviors.
In principle, I stand by my opinion from 2012: When consumers lose trust in algorithmic decision makers, it can be at least partially regained by a shift to translucent modeling. But the mathematics of accomplishing that seem — as it were — rather unclear.
Related link
- Already in 2011, denanonymization and other technologies of privacy threats were very effective.
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6 Responses to “Technology implications of political trends”
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Another point: most databases, specially analytic databases, are not optimized for DELETE statements (or their NoSQL equivalents). This will have to change.
There’s an immense generational shift coming too. My spouse and I have both worked in what you might call the “personalization technology” industry. Our teenage children think that’s an appalling thing, not unlike selling cigarettes to minors. My youngest even argued the other day I had an ethical obligation *not* to do what I’d described as a fairly routine customer MDM operation.
Our kids have listened to us talk about personalization their whole lives, so they’re liberal when it comes to the possibilities. Their friends are not. In ten years, whether the regulatory framework reflects their desires or not, the opt-ins from that generation will be thin and traded for dear.
[…] Description: A general analytics and database management blog with a huge number of categories. Easy to navigate for what you want to find and some well-written articles. Some more casual than others. You’ll find a number of articles focused on politics if that is of interest to you. There are even a few research blogs thrown in for good measure. Alexa Rank: 2,480,873 Post frequency: 1-2 per month Article to check out: One of the politically oriented posts will give you a sense of the writing style. Interesting read. Technology implications of political trends […]
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machine learning has been evolving almost every single day recently and is not going to stop in near future.
superdatascience
thank you.