DATA, The Real Estate Of The Modern World
Information is the new money of the world. Privacy is the luxury of the future.
According to Wikipedia,
Data (US: /ˈdætə/; UK: /ˈdeɪtə/) are individual facts, statistics, or items of information, often numeric. In a more technical sense, data are a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables about one or more persons or objects, while a datum (singular of data) is a single value of a single variable.
A report by science daily in May 2013, showed that 90% of all the data in the world was generated between 2011 and 2013. And most of this data is captured by internet companies.
A 2018 article by Forbes indicates that at our current pace then, we generated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data.
The more you use your fingers to type when online, the more data you create.
People can always get most data they want on and about you if they set out to get it. A lot of information about you is publicly available than you think. Is this the time to be critical of what you share and do online? You can answer that better.
A study by Digital Universe found that 0.5% of global data is analyzed, and just half of the data requiring security measures is protected.
HOW IS DATA COLLECTED?
Muslims believe in Angels but as creatures of God too. Every human being gets assigned two Angels ( Kiraaman Katibin ) by God once they attain the puberty stage specifically to write deeds. One writes all the good deeds you do and the other writes all the bad deeds you do. Even the tiniest good or bad deed is written down.
So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it. And whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it. Quran: 99: 7–8 (Translation by Quran.com)
Then every Thursday and Monday of the week, they take the report to God and compile it in your deeds book on which you will be held accountable for the bad deeds and rewarded for the good deeds on the day of judgment. If the bad deeds outweigh the good deeds, hell will be your destination and if the good deeds outweigh the bad ones, paradise will be your soul’s final destination.
That’s the spiritual part of the data collection according to Islam. But how is the worldly data collected?
Data collection depends on the kind of data one has set out to collect. Here are some of the ways data can be collected;
Analytics codes
Even on this website, we use analytics software that tracks almost everything you do here. Where you touch, what you click on, what articles you read, and where you came from to read our articles (direct from google search, social media or from a link you found on another website).
All that data is captured and stored under the analytics code which you may analogize as the soul to which your good deeds and bad deeds are attached.
When you visit some websites and use some apps, you are always prompted to accept cookies or consent to data capturing. Accepting cookies means you have granted the website or app owners via 3rd party software to capture all the data you generate while on that particular website and how long you stay there.
Online/ offline surveys questionnaires and forms
Let’s say you visit a doctor and they start asking you several questions as they note down your responses. That data is stored on forms or databases depending on the storage medium the doctor is using. That is also a way of data collection.
When getting your national id or passport, you were asked to provide some data about yourself on the forms. From your full name, date of birth, place of birth, etc. That data about you that you provided, was stored and is kept under your National Id Number or Passport Number.
When companies and organizations send out surveys asking you about your preferences and how you do certain things in your life. All that data gets stored.
Accounts creation and Data generation
When you create an account for anything, you are always asked to provide some data about you. Basically, it is usually a full name, username, sex, and email address or phone number.
When you create an account on social media or a fintech app or software as a service (SaaS), you also generate data through your usage. Let’s assume you have created a Twitter account, the time you created that account, the device you used, and the location where you were, is all data generated and stored by Twitter. By the way, that data is Twitter’s property even though it is you who has generated it.
Then from the first account you follow, the first tweet you like, retweet, or open, you create a pattern of the kind of content that interests you and that data pattern too you have generated is also stored. Still again, a pattern of your login times is also generated and recorded. In technical terms, it is called User-generated data.
Spyware and Spy Cameras
Individuals, private organizations and government institutions go on to spy on their targets to get a glimpse of what this person is doing, saying, and their whereabouts. Spy cameras and spyware installed in buildings and on devices are meant to provide such data so that one can get an idea of what happens where and on who when they are not around.
Data gives superpowers and control
One of the things that make God God is because He has every data about us (Past, Present and Future).
“Surely Allah knows the unseen of the heavens and earth. And Allah is All-Seeing of what you do.”
~Quran 49:18 (Translation by Quran.com)
The more data you have about something, the more power you have over it. The greater your command on it especially if you get to use it to your advantage. Data makes information and information gives superpowers. Imagine knowing what someone is about to do in the next hour.
Imagine if you had every data about every human just in your community, you would be among the most powerful guys in the area. A community asset. Imagine if you knew what someone ate, where they slept, whom they slept with, what time they did sleep and woke up, what they bought, what they touched, what they like, and whom they love. You would be having huge control over that person.
Data has no expiry date
If it ever expires, then it is history, and history by itself is also valuable data. So data has no expiry date.
Data can be like art. The longer it gets preserved without being corrupted, the more valuable it becomes.
More is better when it comes to data
The more data you capture, the more valuable the one you already have become.
The more the data the more valuable it becomes. And if the data is well analyzed and specific, the more of a treasure it becomes.
Data is great for decision making
When you are watching a TV documentary about plane crashes, you might be thinking flying is the worst decision ever until you look at the data on how safe it is compared to road accidents.
But, some decisions are less about facts and data and more about feelings. For instance, a color to paint your room or sending a risky text to your crush. Though, you can still use data if you want for such decisions like looking at the number of your friends having blue as the colour painted in their rooms.
If you use MTN or Airtel sim cards, you will find that your personalized paka voice or data bundles starting prices increase over time. They make that decision to increase your personalized bundles based on your frequency of buying them.
That goes on to MTN Mokash or Airtel Wewole loans on your phone. The more you save, borrow and pay, the higher your loan limit gets. You generate the data on which someone or an organization bases to make certain decisions.
The same goes for how your credit score in banks and other financial institutions is determined. They look at your history of financial data accumulation.
If you shop online like on Amazon.com, you will see that some products are recommended for you and that is based on your purchase history.
Data can be used against you and even biased in form of social currency
You are watching or have watched a presentation by a fast-talking salesperson telling you how much money they’ve made for people who have invested in their shoddy-looking scheme and now you’re imagining how much money you can make too if you just put your savings into their scheme. That can be quite biased because one can pick data differently or present it in different ways so it appears to say and support what they want to put across.
With data, a good number of someones can become everyone in the eyes of someone.
For example, if 15 of the 60 people in the neighborhood take their kids to school X, the rest are likely to say “Everyone is taking their kids to school X” and they are also likely to be influenced to take their kids to school X. That is social currency.
If you asked a person who has failed at marriage of what their perspective about marriage success is, they are likely to give you a perspective based on their experience and even quote data that matches it.
Data patterns don’t tell lies, it’s humans that usually manipulate data to match their use cases. Someone can go to make a research but only presents the data that supports what they personally wanted to believe.
How is your data sold? Who buys it and what do they use it for?
“If you knew what they were harvesting ALL THE DATA for, it would blow your mind!” -conspiracybot (@conspiracyb0t) May 14, 2022
We assume you have an email address that ends with a gmail.com e.g yourname@gmail.com or have an account on social media or use google to quench your curiosity.
You should have seen ads on social media platforms or on google or in the apps you use or websites you visit and have even advertised or boosted your products or services on such platforms and you get charged to advertise or boost your content on those platforms.
They charge you because they have data on every user. We have seen above how data is collected and generated.
If you collect data on individuals targeting a specific objective let’s say the ability to buy online. You can know which characteristics of people to advertise to and which products they’re likely to buy and the specific times in the year they buy. That’s why there are organizations that pay people to fill online surveys like $2 per survey and they collect lots of data which they use in marketing and they sell it to other companies with products.
If it is free to use a service or product, then you are the customer.
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CONCLUSION:
Data, is one of the reasons why Elon Musk paid $44 billion to buy Twitter. He can use those twitter conversations databases in his artificial intelligence companies.
Privacy is a luxury of the future. Data is everywhere, but turning it into information, into a useful state, is not everywhere. That takes more effort, focus and time.
If you can’t do anything with the data, it’s never going to be information.