This is what progress looks like: Not easy, not pretty, but indispensable.
An article in the Wall Street Journal, Google’s Data-Trove Dance, graphically outlines the internal conflicts within Google about privacy versus more extensive of use of data. The article said.
under increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe, executives are engaged in wide-ranging internal debates and in some cases slowing product launches to address privacy concerns
The debates within Google mirror the debates in the broader society. On the one hand, embracing the data-driven economy will increase quality of life, create jobs, and improve fiscal trade-offs. On the other hand, the data-driven economy raises important privacy concerns that cannot be wished away.
What’s going on here? In the data-driven economy, data is an important new input to economic activity. In fact, just today the BEA released an important new revision to GDP which counts investment in ‘intangibles’.
The benefits of data are profound. Because people are contributing their data about their location, you know which traffic-clogged roads to avoid, and which restaurants to patronize. Because people are contributing their data about jobs and skills, we have much more transparency about career paths and the job market, so potential workers can learn what kind of education and training they need. Because people are contributing their words and pictures, we’ve been able to build communities that go beyond our immediate geographical borders.
Back in 2005, Benjamin Friedman of Harvard released a fascinating book entitled The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. Friedman argued that “our conventional thinking about economic growth fails to reflect the breadth of what growth, or its absence, means for a society.” Growth encourages social virtues such as fairness, tolerance, and mobility, while the absence of growth undercuts social virtues such as democracy.
So the debate is not simply about privacy vs growth. We care about privacy, but we also care about the social benefits generated by growth. And that’s why I believe we should say ‘yes’ to the data-driven economy.
