“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.” This is how Aaron Swartz‘s Guerilla Open Access Manifesto begins. His manifesto concentrates on free access to scientific publications. I certainly sympathize for that view, but that is not exactly the topic I want to talk about. The idea of this post is to start from the quotation above and analyze it in the context of personal data. This topic has been in the spotlight for quite some time now, in particular after the NSA scandal. However, here I am not directly concerned about governments collecting data for intelligence, I am more concerned about firms whose business is strictly related to data collection.

With the risk of stretching things a little bit, it seems to me that we are slowly going towards a society that is divided into two parts. Those who own behavioral information about their users and the users who provide it. This to me is somehow reminiscent of the class division that was experienced during the first industrial revolution. By analogy with capitalists and workers, I am going to call the information owners, informationists, and the people who provide the data, users (in a first version of this post I tried to called them “daters”, that in my opinion was a more appealing name, but then I realized that they sounded more like latin lovers than data providers). Some people might argue that this has always been the case: To a certain extent, companies has always been informationists and consumers has always been users. Companies always tried to collect as much information as possible in order to target their products and price discriminate among consumers. For example, a thing that few people know is that the message: “This phone call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes”, does not imply that there might be a supervisor listening to the phone call, or that the phone call is going to be used in some training session. In many cases, it actually implies that the conversation is used to train an artificial intelligence that listens to customer calls together with the operator and based on her tone of voice and answers, it suggests which offer the user is more likely to accept. So, it is probably true, that even more traditional businesses have always collect data about their costumers to target their products, but in the last 10 years, thanks to the Internet and an exponentially increasing computational power, informationists have been able to collect an unprecedented amount of information about the behavior of their users. Now, they do not only know what products I am buying, they know when I wake up in the morning. Moreover, the business model of informationists is completely different. Traditional companies collect information to sell real products, informationists usually offer free products to collect behavioral data. Data are no more the mean, they are the goal. Just last week IBM announced they are going to offer an AI service in the cloud to allow mobile developers to make use of artificial intelligence more heavily. Artificial intelligence needs user data in order to learn and do meaningful things.

Now, do not get me wrong I do not want to sound like a Luddite. I think this process is irreversible (like industrialization was) and that is actually going to be beneficial for users in the long run. However, I reckon that this process is not free of difficulties. Control of something like behavioral data might be quite dangerous and create big differences between who has access to the data and who has not. We should start studying more closely this phenomenon and similarly to what was done in the last century create some sort of associations to protect users rights. The power of informationists comes from their monopoly over information. What if users started collecting data themselves in a systematic and anonymous way and share them freely? Similarly, we might need commissions that monitor what kind of data are collected and for which purposes. It might be said that this would slow down innovation, but in the end medical/pharmaceutical research has had to comply with pretty high ethical standards for some decades now and, still, it remains a quite innovative field. At least, we would probably need independent people (i.e., people not paid by informationists) who start thinking about some issues related to AIs that are more and more able to predict our behavior (see for example Google Now) and therefore, potentially, to behave like us. For example, what is going to happen if we were to reach a point close to the technological singularity? Who would be in charge? Should development be stopped at that point? Governments should probably be responsible to provide answers to these questions (in the end it is key for their survival, too), but I doubt that we are going to see any step in this direction as long as policy makers do not even know the difference between the IPv4 and the IPv6. I am not saying that everyone should know it, just someone in the legislative process. But this is probably going to be the topic of another post.

Thinking in these terms gives a whole new view of high-tech companies. When Facebook was quoted on stock markets its market capitalization was around 90 billion of dollars (more than 170 now). Some people started screaming “Bubble!” and, to be honest, I was one of them. I could not understand how a social network like Facebook which at that time was not doing much profits could be quoted that high. Rethinking about this now, I was looking at the thing from the wrong point of view. “Information is power”. And power easily transforms into money, I would add. It is not important how much actual money a high-tech company is doing. An informationist by its own nature is only concerned with the number of users it has. That is the only thing that matters. Sooner or later those data will become of some use. Maybe (probably) in ways we have not thought of, yet.