Watched by the Web: Surveillance Is Reborn

By Michiko Kakutani
 June 10, 2013

Google does it. Amazon does it. Walmart does it. And, as news reports last week made
clear, the United States government does it.

Does what? Uses “big data” analysis of the swelling flood of data that is being generated
and stored about virtually every aspect of our lives to identify patterns of behavior and
make correlations and predictive assessments.

Amazon uses customer data to give us recommendations based on our previous

purchases. Google uses our search data and other information it collects to sell ads and
to fuel a host of other services and products.

The National Security Agency, a news article in The Guardian revealed last week, is
collecting the phone records of millions of American customers of Verizon —
“indiscriminately and in bulk” and “regardless of whether they are suspected of any
wrongdoing” — under a secret court order. Under another
surveillance program called Prism, The Guardian and The Washington Post reported,
the agency has been collecting data from e-mails, audio and video chats, photos,
documents and logins, from leading Internet companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google,
Facebook and Apple, to track foreign targets.
Why spread such a huge net in search of a handful of terrorist suspects? Why vacuum up
data so indiscriminately? “If you’re looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a
haystack,” Jeremy Bash, chief of staff to Leon E. Panetta, the former director of the
Central Intelligence Agency and defense secretary, said on Friday.

Credit...Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

In “Big Data,” their illuminating and very timely book, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a
professor of Internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at
Oxford University, and Kenneth Cukier, the data editor for The Economist, argue that
the nature of surveillance has changed.

“In the spirit of Google or Facebook,” they write, “the new thinking is that people are the
sum of their social relationships, online interactions and connections with content. In
order to fully investigate an individual, analysts need to look at the widest possible
penumbra of data that surrounds the person — not just whom they know, but whom
those people know too, and so on.”

Mr. Cukier and Mr. Mayer-Schönberger argue that big data analytics are revolutionizing
the way we see and process the world — they even compare its consequences to those of
the Gutenberg printing press. And in this volume they give readers a fascinating — and
sometimes alarming — survey of big data’s growing effect on just about everything:
business, government, science and medicine, privacy and even on the way we think.
Notions of causality, they say, will increasingly give way to correlation as we try to make
sense of patterns.

Data is growing incredibly fast — by one account, it is more than doubling every two

years — and the authors of this book argue that as storage costs plummet and
algorithms improve, data-crunching techniques, once available only to spy agencies,
research labs and gigantic companies, are becoming increasingly democratized.

Big data has given birth to an array of new companies and has helped existing
companies boost customer service and find new synergies. Before a hurricane, Walmart
learned, sales of Pop-Tarts increased, along with sales of flashlights, and so stores began
stocking boxes of Pop-Tarts next to the hurricane supplies “to make life easier for
customers” while boosting sales. UPS, the authors report, has fitted its trucks with
sensors and GPS so that it can monitor employees, optimize route itineraries and know
when to perform preventive vehicle maintenance.

Baseball teams like Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s (immortalized in Michael Lewis’s best-
seller “Moneyball”) have embraced new number-crunching approaches to scouting
players with remarkable success. The 2012 Obama campaign used sophisticated data
analysis to build a formidable political machine for identifying supporters and getting
out the vote. And New York City has used data analytics to find new efficiencies in
everything from disaster response, to identifying stores selling bootleg cigarettes, to
steering overburdened housing inspectors directly to buildings most in need of their
attention. In the years to come, Mr. Mayer-Schönberger and Mr. Cukier contend, big
data will increasingly become “part of the solution to pressing global problems like
addressing climate change, eradicating disease and fostering good governance and
economic development.”
Viktor Mayer-SchönbergerCredit...Rob Judges

There is, of course, a dark side to big data, and the authors provide an astute analysis of
the dangers they foresee. Privacy has become much more difficult to protect, especially
with old strategies — “individual notice and consent, opting out and anonymization” —
losing effectiveness or becoming completely beside the point.

“The ability to capture personal data is often built deep into the tools we use every day,
from Web sites to smartphone apps,” the authors write. And given the myriad ways data
can be reused, repurposed and sold to other companies, it’s often impossible for users to
give informed consent to “innovative secondary uses” that haven’t even been imagined
when the data was first collected.

The second danger Mr. Cukier and Mr. Mayer-Schönberger worry about sounds like a
scenario from the sci-fi movie “Minority Report,” in which predictions seem so accurate
that people can be arrested for crimes before they are committed. In the real near future,
the authors suggest, big data analysis (instead of the clairvoyant Pre-Cogs in that movie)
may bring about a situation “in which judgments of culpability are based on
individualized predictions of future behavior.”

Already, insurance companies and parole boards use predictive analytics to help
tabulate risk, and a growing number of places in the United States, the authors of “Big
Data” say, employ “predictive policing,” crunching data “to select what streets, groups
and individuals to subject to extra scrutiny, simply because an algorithm pointed to
them as more likely to commit crime.”

Last week an NBC report noted that in so-called signature drone strikes “the C.I.A.
doesn’t necessarily know who it is killing”: in signature strikes “intelligence officers and
drone operators kill suspects based on their patterns of behavior — but without positive
identification.”
One problem with relying on predictions based on probabilities of behavior, Mr. Mayer-
Schönberger and Mr. Cukier argue, is that it can negate “the very idea of the
presumption of innocence.”

Kenneth CukierCredit...Rob Judges

“If we hold people responsible for predicted future acts, ones they may never commit,”
they write, “we also deny that humans have a capacity for moral choice.”

At the same time, they observe, big data exacerbates “a very old problem: relying on the
numbers when they are far more fallible than we think.” They point to escalation of the
Vietnam War under Robert S. McNamara (who served as secretary of defense to
Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson) as a case study in “data analysis
gone awry”: a fierce advocate of statistical analysis, McNamara relied on metrics like the
body count to measure the progress of the war, even though it became clear that
Vietnam was more a war of wills than of territory or numbers.

More recent failures of data analysis include the Wall Street crash of 2008, which was
accelerated by hugely complicated trading schemes based upon mathematical
algorithms. In his best-selling 2012 book, “The Signal and the Noise,” the statistician
Nate Silver, who writes the FiveThirtyEight blog for The New York Times, pointed to
failures in areas like earthquake science, finance and biomedical research, arguing that
“prediction in the era of Big Data” has not been “going very well” (despite his own
successful forecasts in the fields of politics and baseball).

Also, as the computer scientist and musician Jaron Lanier points out in his brilliant new
book, “Who Owns the Future?,” there is a huge difference between “scientific big data,
like data about galaxy formation, weather or flu outbreaks,” which with lots of hard
work can be gathered and mined, and “big data about people,” which, like all things
human, remains protean, contradictory and often unreliable.
To their credit, Mr. Cukier and Mr. Mayer-Schönberger recognize the limitations of
numbers. Though their book leaves the reader with a keen appreciation of the tools that
big data can provide in helping us “quantify and understand the world,” it also warns us
about falling prey to the “dictatorship of data.”

“We must guard against overreliance on data,” they write, “rather than repeat the error
of Icarus, who adored his technical power of flight but used it improperly and tumbled
into the sea.”
BIG DATA
A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
By Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
242 pages. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.