My blumenstock response

Nowadays, big data can do lots of things for people. In the promise part, the author, blumenstock, gives three vivid examples of the applications of data in real life. First, data can help banks detect personal debts and get credit scores, which influences on whether they are willing to lend out money to a certain person. Second, some algorithms can identify poverty through people’s mobile phone data and satellites’ imagery, which suppose to provide useful information for countries to solve their poverty problems. However, people didn’t get a satisfying result in real life practice. Third, data can track personal footprints during an epidemic or how people were affected by natural disaster.

There are also pitfalls with big data. Firstly, real life examples from different parts of the world shows that unanticipated effects happen and the methods are not always helpful. Secondly, the pattern detected by data cannot be generalized and change a lot overtime, which shows the data is lack of validation. Thirdly, not everyone’s data is equally collected, which might lead to biased algorithms. Finally, some countries seldom pay attention to issues of data privacy, algorithmic transparency, fairness and accountability.

In order to improve on the application of data, we could gain new sources of data, make the algorithms more customized through collaboration between data scientists, government and different organizations and improve local technically capacity.

Data science has benefited people a lot for the past several years. Though there’s still rooms for progress, data has made people’s lives more convenient and promote the development of human society. From Blumenstock’s article and the discussion in class, I learned that ‘when dealing with the problems which determine people’s experiences’, we still need to try our best to make the algorithm to solve practical problems to the greatest extent through cooperation between various fields, which would lead to targeted algorithm specific to certain areas and problems.

At the same time, people might feel that their privacy are not well protected since basically almost everything they do could be transferred into data and obtained by companies. I agree that transparency is important because people have the right to know what data is being collected and if the companies sell the data to others. But I’m also worry about transparency can to what extent protect users’ privacy. There might be some data be collected as long as you use a certain app, but you neither want them to get that information nor stop using the app. For example, I feel uncomfortable for the location of my apartment might be collected as data while I use an app to get a taxi. Overall, I think people’s privacy is inevitably decreasing recently. Maybe it’s a good idea to talk about what is privacy nowadays and regulations should be set based on the definition of privacy to better achieve a balance in the future.