Gimme Data

At SXSW, the big question about Big Data is who owns the data, reports Geoffrey A. Fowler in The Wall Street Journal (3/13/13). John Wilbanks of Sage Bionetworks made this point by opening his talk “by playing a song called ‘Gimme My Damn Data’.” John acknowledges “the great possibilities of data for improving science and individual health,” but “lamented the currently ‘broken’ system where people can’t easily use data about themselves.”

“It is very hard to open-source your data,” says John. “It is owned by whoever has it – and it might be considered a corporate secret or private.” Charlene Zvolanek of Team One also notes that after death “all of our data might be made available to historians, anthropologists and generations to come.” In the meantime, the conference was crawling with all kinds of cool, Big Data applications, among them “hats that measure brain activity during sleep and bras that can help detect cancer.”

The quirkiest was an “augmented-reality Porta Potty that indicates how long their occupants are inside and whether they were standing or sitting.” The buzziest was Google’s Glass, the cyborg spectacles. When someone asked why Glass couldn’t do anything “more remarkable than showing news headlines, reading emails and taking photos,” Google’s Timothy Jordan said that it could, in fact, use facial recognition to identify approaching humans, but explained that it doesn’t because doing so “doesn’t actually improve life.”