Day 1 | Keynote | Own Your Data: Taking Control of our Digital Future
good morning everyone and thank you so much for having me thank you to the pearson global forum in university of chicago and all of the teams involved for the invitation and of course for organizing such an incredible event that i'm so honored to be a part of i'm here today to speak to you about what i believe is one of the most important issues that we are facing in the world today i call this talk own your data taking control of our digital future because unfortunately at a time where the entire world has been nearly forced to lead a completely digital life for the past year and a half we have been completely unprepared for what that means for us to be producing exponentially more personal data than ever before for the dangers of social media to even be reaching our children who are now on social media and devices nearly all of the time even for their education we are living in a digital world yet we don't really have defined digital rights in most countries around the world so considering what our rights should be what we want them to be and what we're going to fight for is so important and becomes more pressing of an issue every single day you've probably heard this one before but in october 2017 the economist told us that data had now become more valuable than oil and gas data is the world's most valuable asset a multi-trillion dollar industry that makes decisions for every single move that we make both private and public organizations use data in order to drive strategy in order to drive sales in order to make every single decision that affects government business military and everything in between so somehow all of us have become the producers of the world's most valuable asset class an asset that is bought and sold and traded around the world second to second creating trillions of dollars of value yet somehow we as the producers of this incredibly valuable asset somehow have been left without rights to that value and you think well how did we really get into this situation over the past many decades the world's largest companies have developed into multi-billion dollar or even trillion dollar corporations their value is completely made up of the data that has been collected from us the users over the past many decades these technologies have been built specifically to be as extractive as possible and what i mean by that is that the technologies are specifically built to take away as much information from us as possible and use that data in order to create strategies models advertisements products and everything that a business would decide every single day so this incredibly valuable data that we are producing now has created the world's most valuable industries i like to call these companies or these technologies that they're built upon legacy technologies because i don't believe that these legacy technologies are going to be used in the future today we're really at a turning point where technologies of the past that were built to take away as much from us as possible without us explicitly understanding what we are agreeing to where information is going who gets to use it and of course whether or not it's going to be monetized or if we have the right to revoke our consent the right to delete the right to say we don't want to participate and still be able to use technology we're at this turning point where we have the ability to start to build a more ethical transparent and consensual digital future so how did i get here why am i one of the people that should be talking to you about this issue so i started working in technology originally when i came back home to chicago in 2007 after leaving college to join the first obama campaign i was so excited to become a part of barack obama's new media team one of the first five people to join and it was there where we invented what is now known as social media strategy we were the first team to ever use social media instead of just for peer-to-peer communications for larger scale campaigns and the first to use it for politics and what i saw was that the more data we were able to collect about what people were doing on social media what they cared about what they believed in the higher we could get people to engage in politics for me this was a net positive of course as a political activist someone that had especially worked in environmental campaigning earlier in my career i thought that if i could use data to get millions of people to actually care about politics to show up and vote to register to vote for the first time to actually get involved in political organizing this was an incredible opportunity to make sure that people who perhaps had never gotten involved in politics before could now start to learn how to make a difference a tangible difference in the lives of their families and their communities so as i saw our campaign barack obama's first presidential start to break all known records for fundraising for turnout for voter registration i thought that technology was definitely the key to being successful in politics now a couple years later i was completing my law school i had done multiple law degrees in human rights law and had started to study for my phd i was writing my doctoral thesis on something called preventive diplomacy what preventive diplomacy means is how do decision makers presidents prime ministers ambassadors heads of united nations departments how do they make decisions in order to stop crisis or stop war before it happens and as i thought i was going to be writing a legal thesis i thought i was going to be writing about diplomatic strategy and different political philosophies instead most of my research ended up centering around what type of data did decision makers have what data was being collected from where how was it being modeled how was that analysis actually getting into the the hands of decision makers and how quickly were those mechanisms actually working and how good was the modeling and analysis that was being done off of that data so given that my law school couldn't really teach me much about advanced predictive analytics i ended up having a friend introduced me to someone he knew that was running a top data science company he introduced me to the ceo of a company you've probably heard of called cambridge analytica and while i was doing my doctoral thesis i ended up joining that company part-time as a consultant in order to learn as much as i could about data and data science so i could finish my phd now that's probably not how you thought i ended up at cambridge analytica but that's how i got there and over the many years that i spent at that company i think i learned a lot more about data and especially data and politics than i ever bargained for over my years there i started to see that a company that was small we were a tech startup that even a company as small as mine was able to purchase and license personal data about people all around the world and that this data collection was not only rampant it was an untold amount of information about every person that had ever touched a device even data files about people who had never used technology before and that data was either purchasable or licensable or even just available for free for the taking and i started to realize that the amount of information that exists about us is exponentially more than we probably ever expected and when cambridge analytica was speaking to clients around the world it seemed that most clients had no idea what they could or couldn't do with data and therefore we're seeking to use data to get an edge on their political campaign on their government program for their company's advertising and sales purposes and mostly none of these conversations ever touched on the rights of the individual every single large-scale data analytics conversation i would have with a client ended up centering around how they could leverage people's personal information in order to reach their own goals and of course there were plenty of clients and projects that were a hundred percent positive and well-meaning but the further i went down this rabbit hole the more that i learned that some clients were not using any ethical or moral basis for making their decisions and that they would stop at nothing to use people's personal information for personal gain so i decided to leave cambridge analytica and become a whistleblower in march 2018 now three and a half years ago i came out with a package of documents to the guardian newspaper and began my process speaking with regulators investigators and government officials all around the world about what cambridge analytica and facebook had done in political campaigns like brexit and trump what they had done in political campaigns all around the world for so many years how had people's facebook data come into the hands of not just a small startup but over 40 000 other companies that had paid facebook to get access to user data many of them who then sold it on in the open market what does this mean for people's electoral and political rights what does this mean for the concept of data rights are data rights human rights do we have the human right to privacy how do we secure any sort of transparency or consent into how our information is used and what do we do to protect our elections our democracy and of course the rest of our human rights that are affected by some of these technical systems this data collection and our entire digital life and interaction with technology itself so another reason why i believe that this is one of the most important issues today is because we are just looking at the tip of the iceberg for the past many years we have seen the data crisis become bigger every single time when we see a large-scale hack in the news when we see another company where all of its user data has been compromised when we see another government or political party that has used people's personal information in order to undermine democracy as we go into a world that is run by the internet of things iot or even our coffee machines and our robot vacuums will be reporting about the types of data that we produce when we move into a world of smart cities infrastructure where our cars and the way we use public transport the way we walk around public streets will be recorded and producing data when we move into a world of advanced predictive analytics and artificial intelligence where data will run through absolutely everything that we touch and every decision that is made we need to make sure before we get to that point that we understand what our data rights are that we have more defined rights and that we have really stood up for what we seek in order to have a more ethical digital future so i think it's important for us to really dive deep into how we are protected or unprotected by some concepts legally regulatory on the technological technological level as well as in terms of education and awareness what are these big concepts that we have to grapple with the biggest concept of all the overarching umbrella under which everything falls is digital trust what i mean by digital trust is transparency consent accountability ownership and now of course also sustainability so for transparency what i mean is for us to actually understand what data is being taken from us when we're using technology perhaps you could raise your hand if you've ever actually read terms and conditions of any of the applications on your phone if i could see the entire audience i bet i wouldn't see that many hands unfortunately because all of the technology products that we use every single day are designed specifically for us not to know what is taken from us 40 or 50 pages of legalese are designed so that we do not understand and that we will quickly scroll through and agree and allow that application to take as much information as they can possibly get away with so transparency means fixing that it means making sure we actually understand where our data is going and what is going on next is consent can you really call something informed consent if less than one percent of people have read those terms and conditions just ticking that terms and conditions box is not exactly enough for me to call that informed now finally government agencies are starting to agree with me there we've seen recent decisions come out of the federal trade commission the ftc saying that data collection that is not explicitly informed consent undermines consumers rights therefore we need to start moving to a consent model where we have clear and transparent terms and conditions perhaps bullet points that are at a third grade reading level or lower where we actually understand what information is going to be collected where it's going and who it's going to be shared with and of course in the end how it's going to be used this is where we come to accountability especially on a technical level being accountable for where data is going who it's going to be used by and what it's going to be used for right now we might be able to say in europe under gdpr that we don't want our data used for a certain purpose but anyone that chooses not to follow legal or ethical guidelines could decide to take that data and use it for purposes that the original user did not agree to on a technical level how do we start to be able to use advanced forms of encryption and blockchain technologies so that we know that our data is never going to reach hands that we did not agree for it to be in and it would never be used for purposes that we didn't explicitly consent to that's so incredibly important next is my favorite conversation which is ownership who owns the data that is being produced of course i'm the producer and right now under most countries laws around the world i don't own any of that data right now 100 of that data is owned by the platform on which i'm producing that data for example if i log into facebook all of the data that i create within facebook even the data that i upload to facebook like my personal photos and videos those no longer belong to me all of that data 100 belongs to facebook and it says so in the terms and conditions which is why i really implore you to read them especially for applications that you're using every single day but ownership what is the future of ownership in order to own our data we are slowly starting to see changing laws not just in the united states but in many other countries where if we were able to flip this model on its head where we owned the data and if a platform was helping us produce data then they could own a percentage of it as well even the majority percentage because of the amount of money that they have invested into creating this platform so perhaps if i owned my data and i decided to use facebook to produce more data the data that i produce in facebook could be 20 owned by me and 80 owned by facebook that would mean when and whenever any of that information is used for monetization purposes for ads or any other revenue generating activity that i would get a 20 dividend off of the back of that that's what that means and i'm starting to meet with more regulators more policymakers that believe that this could be really the way forward and i'll touch a little bit more on that in a moment lastly is sustainability our drive into a technical future means that we are starting to use more energy more large-scale data centers around the world from processing this data and as we start to use safer more reliable transparent consensual technologies like blockchain running algorithms that encrypt all of our data so that it is safe it is private and we can control it that requires a lot of energy so making sure that the technology that we use is sustainable is one of the last frontiers in making sure that technology remains ethical so i think this is an important point um which a lot of people don't expect me to make which is that i'm not a privacy campaigner i think the word privacy means that if you share your data something bad will happen so you need to keep things private in order to remain safe what privacy actually means to me is that you have the ability to share your data without sharing your personal details details that make up what's called a digital identity my name my address my social security number my birthday any personal information that might normally be on my driver's license or my passport all of that data would never be shared i could for instance decide to share my favorite color or what i had for breakfast in the morning without it explicitly being linked to me and then i would be able to participate in what i see as a very exciting technical future driven by ai and the internet of things and smart cities i think the more data that we are able to produce the faster we are going to solve a lot of the world's greatest problems and what i mean by that is when we have great smart cities infrastructure you're going to see that we won't have any more traffic accidents or mass shootings or terrorist attacks if we are able to use more ai we're going to be able to solve a lot of the world's most pressing medical problems right now most of the medical data collected is from 18 to 35 year old young white males that go in college for extra money to medical trials most of us don't have an easy way of sharing our medical data and therefore it never gets into the hands of researchers so women and minorities don't have medicines work as well on us and that's a data sharing issue i really believe if we're able to share data securely privately and anonymously that we will be able to make the world a better place that we will be able to prevent war and crisis that's how i got into this game in the first place i was never involved in technology until i became an activist and i saw that using technology can help us achieve positive social impact goals much faster and at a much wider scale than ever before and what i really mean by data ownership and this is the most important point i'll make during this entire talk what i mean by data ownership is that if we own the value of our data if we own our piece of this multi-trillion dollar industry that every single day we could make at minimum enough money to feed ourselves and our family yes you heard me right your data is currently worth at minimum enough to purchase your groceries with and a couple dollars a day might not mean much to some of the people listening to this but for billions of people around the world living in poverty or on the poverty line who have difficulty meeting their most basic of human rights which is access to food and clean water a couple dollars a day completely changes their entire world and that's what data ownership is all about that anyone with a device could start to earn money on their device for deciding to share their data and that they could do that safely securely and anonymously and all of us every single day because we are contributors and producers to the world's most valuable asset class that multi-trillion dollar industry that is running every single thing that any company or government or military does every single day that we take that piece of ownership and we get what famously andrew yang or governor gavin newsom called the data dividend that we get a dividend of the worth of our data's value and then we have the ability to encourage more data production and more wealth generation and a universal earned income for everybody around the world and so there are multiple ways to solve these issues both on the educational level the regulatory and legislative level as well as for technology on the education level i started the own your data foundation you can look it up at ownyourdata.foundation we are partnered with the dq institute where we teach a curriculum that is called dq like iq or eq dq is a digital intelligence quotient that is made up of all of these indicator sets where you get a score of how digitally intelligent you are do you understand your data rights are you digitally literate can you are you media literate so you can spot fake news and disinformation do you know how to use empathy when you are online so that you can prevent cyber bullying and protect your mental health and well-being while using social media do you understand how to manage your screen time your digital footprint and your reputation all of these play into what is called dq on the legal and regulatory front i have helped write a lot of the digital asset and privacy laws in the united states as well as working with plenty of other countries on their first data protection laws or digital asset laws and one of the most important pieces of legislative infrastructure or writing is that your digital assets are your intangible personal property because when your data is your property then you have the ability to protect it property rights are the strongest form of law and we are starting to see that becoming a more popular model around the world in privacy legislation and then of course i'm a big fan of blockchain technology i know i've just run out of time so i will close up where i believe that using advanced forms of encryption and secure and and private networks where we are actually able to make sure that our data is safe and it is only going where we have allowed it to and only be being used for purposes to which we agreed so i'll close this with my favorite quote from the late great dr stephen hawking where he used to always say that technology will allow us to live in luxurious leisure where we build technology and we engage with technology specifically because it can make everyone's lives better and i do believe that you might say i'm an eternal optimist but i have always been in technology because i believe that it will have a positive effect on everyone's lives and a positive effect on our future and so now we all have to work together to make sure that that is true we can protect our digital future by engaging today and so thank you so much for inviting me here thank you for having me and i hope you all enjoy the rest of the summit
2021-10-22 11:18
