Sir Tim's guide to Planet Data
A London event saw Sir Tim Berners-Lee explain that big data can and must work with, not against, privacy needs.
"When there's a data infrastructure, things work more easily. For example, with a city's transport infrastructure." Those were the words of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, giving an opening keynote address to this year's IP Expo trade show in London.
Transport for London's online services infrastructure has enabled people to be up to date with what's going on around the city - saving time and money while suggesting ways to boost performance and efficiencies for individuals and businesses, he said.
But developments in this field could go much further, he said, since a wide range of data from other sources could be merged and analysed to the benefit of almost every area of our lives.
And for this to happen, companies and individuals must take charge.
"I have been asked to talk about the future; there's a lot of it, more than there has been in the past and it's coming on faster and faster," he said.
"Individuals and businesses need to think about not just what will happen, but what they would like to happen. The future is in large part created by our actions today. It won't just happen if you just sit there. So these are my instructions for the future, rather than predictions."
For example, the idea of broader access to real-time health data gives many people pause, he said, but managed properly it would be beneficial. Just-in-time access to the latest data on an individual can undoubtedly change medical diagnoses, treatments, and lives.
This, of course, means that more data should be made available, and the IT solutions provided should reflect that, and provide it in a usable, accessible way. Simply providing access won't do; people want not only to find the relevant data but be able to make use of it.
"People are saying ‘give me the data, not in a beautiful website - just give me the data'," he said. "And open data is required for government transparency. This is not just about finding out who is spending their expenses on what, but how we spend public money [overall] and that's a world where corruption is much less likely to flourish."
Online platforms and data sources can be merged and presented in real time alongside political roundtables and debates, for example.
But instead of selected bits and pieces of information being showcased, as is the case today during some live broadcasts on TV and online, web services might be used to help the audience interrogate what the politicians are saying in real time, with the politicians then responding immediately with additional information, or apologising, if need be, if they realised their own facts were wrong.
This could improve the workings of democracy and the political process enormously, said Berners-Lee.
Achieving such a lofty goal will obviously require the co-operation and creativity of the entire IT industry, including the channel. Web services, applications and hardware must all work together efficiently, and many barriers to data and information sharing must be removed or reduced. This means more attention must be paid to privacy, not less, so trust can develop.
"People talk about big data a lot, and a lot of people see big data as a threat, and then start to push back," said Berners-Lee.
This means, he suggested, that in future there could be less emphasis on using people's data for advertising and marketing purposes and more put on actually using data to improve essential services. Healthcare, policing, national security, democracy and, in a sense, liberty could stand to gain.
Personal data is most valuable to the individual to whom it pertains, Berners-Lee believes, and therefore the individual should consent to its use and receive the benefit. So should companies that wish to harvest personal data for commercial purposes be paying individuals for their data?
People might argue that any profits derived from personal data should involve recompense - but that is quite "wrong-headed", even if targeted advertising does make people "feel queasy", according to Berners-Lee.
The right approach, he said, is to focus on informed consent and openness, coupled with transparent and rigorous governance of data handling and privacy, as well as security.
"I want to have control of access to all the data about me," he said. "So we will write apps around the data from all the different parts of my life and my friends' and family's lives and that will help us live better, in a healthier way, for example. And in business we will get data from all the different parts of it and put it back into the business."
Get smarter about tech
Smart technologies and artificial intelligence will be as key as the cloud and mobility.
This would not only be about data sharing between individuals and businesses, or individuals and the public sector, but between businesses and other organisations. It would need to be more about mutual collaboration than about authoritarian or Big Brother-type practices, he implied.
"It will mean much more reciprocity, and we will be able to protect things better, by gently opening up the, kind of, data kimono to our partners. This is not about putting public data online, but exchanging very confidential and valuable data, very carefully, and significantly, with our business partners," Berners-Lee said.
Individuals will often willingly give consent for their data to be used, if it is for the right purposes and no others - to save someone's life in an car accident, for example, where time is of the essence, he maintained.
Does the more careful, yet more profound, use of data from multiple sources sound like too much blue sky, like too complex a task for flawed, limited humanity? "It won't be easy, but I'm hopeful," said Berners-Lee. "I think we're going to make it."