Fixing the data economy, and economic inequality.

Abstract

We’re in a digital data economy where an unprecedented amount of analysable information on humans, (Internet-of-) things, and nature opens up vast opportunities (more than ever before) for accelerated insights, innovation and economic growth. According to the UN Financial Trade Quarterly (FTQ) report of 2019, the five largest data firms in the world—Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft—are actors in the digital data economy with a combined market value of nearly $4 trillion (as of 2019, and growing) that represents approximately 20% of market capitalisation in the US. However, the people—whose raw data is driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution—play a rather passive role in the modern digital economy as they are often shamelessly, and unfairly, left out of the capitalist value chain that transforms their raw data into huge monetary benefits using powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. This nontransparent data economy brings an added disadvantage to common people in the form of privacy risks. Most visibly, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its influence on the 2016 US (and 2014 Indian) elections demonstrated that individuals are increasingly at privacy risk to become manipulated, against their preferences, through big data aggregating and analysing firms in the unfair surveillance capitalism age (a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff).