Data is the New Oil
Have you ever wondered how WhatsApp earns money? Recently, WhatsApp rolled out its new Privacy Policy which placed concern amongst users about their data being shared with 3rd party apps. Also, in a recent status update, WhatsApp posted that it does not share users’ contact information with Facebook, but does it mean that they do not share any data? What is data all about and what information are you agreeing to share when you tick the check box without reading the Terms & Conditions.
Mathematician Clive Humby quoted this way back in 2006 but has recently gained attention after The Economist published an article saying,
“The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”
Data has replaced oil as the fuel that runs the world. Oil needs to be drilled, extracted and refined before selling. In a very similar way data needs to be collected, analysed and processed carefully to be used for various purposes. Data helps in surveillance, getting insights into businesses' performance, and manipulating democratic elections too. Data is behind the success of tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Spotify, Netflix and many more.
Good Data beats Opinion. Lord Kelvin once said,
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. When you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind…”
Data will change the way things work with upcoming fields like Data Science, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. McKinsey’s report states that artificial intelligence will add 13 trillion US dollars to the market in the next ten years. AI is evolving exponentially, and to make the models successful, hundreds of petabytes of data are required. According to a research published by Transforma Insights, more than 25 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2030, thereby generating that much data.
But nothing in this world is perfect, and everything has its pros and cons. Unlike oil, data is a renewable resource and will continuously be produced as long as we live. However, just like burning oil causes pollution and harms humanity, data collection hinders privacy and instils fear.
The new privacy policy launched by WhatsApp created a lot of movement across the world. Mark Zuckerberg would have known the way people would react to such updates but still went ahead with the move because the new policy could have brought huge developments because of the sharing of data. In 2014, when Facebook bought Whatsapp, it’s userbase was around 500 million, which has increased to 2 billion in 2020. It is clear that Facebook didn't just buy WhatsApp as an application, but bought its user database. After all, data is money. Although WhatsApp cannot read messages, it can share some sensitive data with 3rd part applications being used by WhatsApp Business users. And if there is a data breach, then all that information would be accessed by hackers. As of now, Indian IT laws are not strict enough to handle such issues.
Personalised ads are the perfect example of how these apps attack our subconscious mind when we are at our most vulnerable. And there are no archives of the ads shown to us, so no evidence of any fake news being circulated. The smart devices that we have are owned by us, but the information which we give them are owned by businesses. Every app that we use today has full access to all our sensitive data because we have permitted them to collect it by agreeing to the terms and conditions.
If you are offered any amount of money for your data, will you sell it? Of course not. But at present, you are doing that for free.
Oil has also been an excellent resource for humankind, but its environmental effects have forced us to search for alternatives. Similarly, Data can help bring huge developments as long as it does not interfere with our privacy.
After all, we do not want our future generations to remember us just like any other data, do we?
