The data revolution: privacy, politics and predictive policing

More than 90% of the world’s data appeared in the past two years. From privacy to politics, Facebook to facial recognition – discover the true impact of this data revolution. Film supported by Mishcon de Reya Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: Erlanger hospital, Tennessee - the medical staff here are at the forefront of efforts to transform healthcare with data and those efforts could make the difference between life and death. At many hospitals there can be critical delays in analyzing brain scans. Hours can go by before patients are properly diagnosed and transferred for emergency treatment. But Dr Tom Devlin’s team is using a new data-driven tool called . It’s machine learning technology quickly draws on fast amounts of medical data gathered from years of research. This hospital is pioneering another data-driven technology that could save lives. Today, Carol will be the world’s first patient to have her brain monitored for signs of a stroke during heart surgery. It’s an innovation that could transform the outcome for heart surgery patients across the world. As Carol goes under the knife this scanner uses data collected on hundreds of patients to identify clots that might be passing to her brain. Data driven innovation is rapidly spreading in parts of the healthcare industry. Services powered by artificial intelligence are said to be worth 6.6 billion dollars by 2021. The data revolution sweeping the modern world has a darker side too. Day and night, vast amounts of personal information are quietly collected from the 2.5 billion people with a smartphone. It’s not just smartphones. The number of connected devices collecting data about their users is on the rise and expected to reach 31 billion worldwide by 2020. Data driven technologies are even being used to influence how people vote. Politicians are increasingly turning to data companies to mine the social media profiles of voters and to hit them with ever more targeted messages. During the 2016 US presidential election, the Trump campaign is believed to have spent tens of millions of dollars on this micro targeting. Trump’s campaign manager co-founded the company that orchestrated this - Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica built what it claimed was a powerful program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box using the personal data of 50 million American Facebook users. But it appears they did so without users permission. It’s not just the Titans of tech coming under closer scrutiny. In communities around the world people are looking more carefully at how public bodies handle their data. In an effort to tackle crime the Los Angeles Police Department is using a novel approach called predictive policing. Predpoll predicts crime by analyzing data from the past several years. The LAPD is trailing another program that goes one step further. Operation laser uses a point system to rank individuals based on their past behavior. The higher your score the greater the chance you will end up on a list of people who, according to the data, are most likely to reoffend. For LAPD chiefs these data-driven technologies are an efficient way to reduce crime but researchers at Cornell University Library found that systems like Predpoll are susceptible to so-called feedback loops where police are repeatedly sent back to the same neighborhoods regardless of the true crime rate. In China there’s precious little discussion about the ethics of data use and here the state is already using data in an effort to control the behavior of its citizens. The government here is building a social credit rating system using individuals data. By 2020 china plans to give all of its 1.4 billion citizens a personal score based on how they behave. The rating system is still being trialed but already it has seen over 12 million people slapped with domestic travel bans as punishment for bad behavior. As the global data revolution accelerates, its ethics are set to come under ever closer scrutiny. Debate is already raging over how to hold companies and governments accountable for how they use data. In Western democracies checks and balances could prevent the kind of exploitation some in China are already facing. But will they? What are the forces shaping how people live and work and how power is wielded in the modern age? NOW AND NEXT reveals the pressures, the plans and the likely tipping points for enduring global change. Understand what is really transforming the world today – and discover what may lie in store tomorrow. For more from Economist Films visit: Check out The Economist’s full video catalogue: Like The Economist on Facebook: Follow The Economist on Twitter: Follow us on Instagram: Follow us on Medium: @the_economist