The Analogue Choice in the Digital Age

In early 2018, a fitness tracking app that uses GPS to track a subscriber’s exercise activity published a “heatmap” showing the exercise paths its users logged as they ran or cycled. Generated using three trillion points of data from a total of approximately one billion activities, the data visualisation showed the activities of all of its users around the world.

The “heatmap”, generated for educational purposes quickly attracted controversy. The running tracks revealed sensitive information about the location and staffing at military bases and spy outposts around the world, including a clear outline of a military base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

More recently, Apple proclaimed privacy as a major feature of its new credit card, highlighting that the company would not capture information on where a customer shopped, how much he paid or what he bought. Much of the tracking would happen using on-device intelligence, not on Apple servers. Put simply, Apple has prioritised privacy over the ability to harness any of its customer’s payment information. Such divergences in approach has given rise to several exceedingly difficult questions.

What is consent?

Is an individual the absolute owner of the data he generates in the course of his actions? If so, what rights does he relinquish when a blanket consent is provided to a platform that collects and stores this data? Is there an obvious distinction between personal data, in this case the running route an individual took and derived data, the amalgamation of millions of individual running routes used to generate a heatmap? Can consent and ownership exist in harmony or will there always be tension and ambiguity? More fundamentally, what is consent? Should privacy concerns override all other considerations, as Apple’s approach suggests?

Traditional consent

Consent, in a dictionary definition, means the permission for something to happen or an agreement to do something. In a traditional rule-based world, this definition governs a majority of our activities, from the way we drive, to the food we eat. Similarly, we own or use something because there is consent amongst parties that we have paid a sufficient price for that product or service to own or utilise it.

Herein lies the conundrum. A majority of us did not pay to use the extensive services of Facebook, Google or YouTube. Compounding this is the fact that many of us volunteered personal data, such as date of birth, photographs, status updates, keyword searches or videos, to these platforms without coercion - albeit some key fields were required to use the features of these services. When asked if we accepted the terms of conditions of the platform, a large majority of us would click yes without hesitation – termed uninformed consent, often a consequence of consent fatigue.

Monetarising data – the tradeoffs

We have come to the realisation that the uninformed consent we provided has allowed new business models that leverage on data to flourish. However, it is unreasonable to suggest that the technology giants are completely to blame. Raw data we provide has marginal value at best. An individual using a fitness tracker cannot conclude that the route he takes is a popular route. However, the fitness tracker company, by visualising the data points of all its customers on a “heatmap”, can make a more definite conclusion and translate it to monetary gains, by say, collaborating with a vendor to establish a beverage stand at a prominent spot. More importantly, the value of our data remains ambiguous as it is often the outcome and insights generated from the data that actually carry value. Finally, and an often overlooked point - for the platforms to remain commercially viable, continue to innovate and yet remain free of charge, trade-offs must exist at the consumer’s end.

For these reasons, the traditional models of ownership and consent in unambiguous settings, developed during the analogue age, are unsuitable for data in the digital economy. Instead of imposing strict and sometimes unrealistic rules that impede productive analytical outcomes in the name of privacy and consent, the community must instead develop pragmatic standards so that data that is generated and collected can be put to good use and ultimately benefit society.

The way forward

At the individual level, we must decide on a model that suits us – an unpaid subscription that involves trade-offs or a paid subscription that reduces the number of tradeoffs and safeguards privacy fully. At the corporation level, there must be an understanding that well-drafted consent forms do not mean the firm has an unmitigated right to do as it wishes with the data. Similarly, platforms must be redesigned to allow for paid subscriptions – something non-trivial given that it may need significant system architecture modifications. At the state level, questions such as whether there should be ‘data regulators’ will eventually creep into the discourse.

More fundamentally, as a society we must decide the scope and limits of consent in this digital age. From benign situations such as a “heatmap” generated using millions of individual data points to reprehensible circumstances such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the boundaries of consent will continuously be under the spotlight. We have to accept that the traditional definitions of consent cannot be perfectly replicated in the big data age. Similarly, we must also acknowledge that there will be trade-offs to make if we expect absolute privacy. In the words of Albert Einstein, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them”.