How big data will help us hold governments accountable

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WIRED 2015 is our annual two-day celebration of the innovators, inventors, artists and entrepreneurs who are reinventing our world. For more from the event, head over to our WIRED 2015 hub.

In our post-Snowden age, a little paranoia about how our data are collected and used is natural. But what if we turned the tables, and big data became a way to hold governments accountable, instead?

MIT social physicist Alex Pentland thinks that it's possible.

"Today 80 percent of people, including kids, own a phone. And those phones are sensors," he told WIRED 2015 at London's Tobacco Dock. Each of them leaves behind a trail of "digital breadcrumbs": information -- such as how many phones connect to the same tower cell in the same moment -- that is not intended for collection but still is available to companies. 

Pentland said that those breadcrumbs give away more than one would imagine. "You can identify things like poverty rates, mortality rates, crime rates of a given area by analysing those breadcrumbs," he said.

He explained that is not really what people say that matters, but rather the "patterns of interaction" that can be detected in a given area. For instance, an area were there is little interaction, and less diversity, is more prone to crime than a more bustling and multicultural neighbourhood. "The essence of a community is how its members interact," he said.

By keeping track of those patterns, Pentland explained that one could follow the social evolution of communities in real time. "For the first time you can imagine a world where there’s real transparency and accountability of how things are working out, how government policy is working out," Pentland said. In other words, the story told by the "breadcrumbs" might be used to test government's claim on how it's facing issues such as poverty and crime. 

Pentland underlined how the idea has already started to catch on in places such as the United Nations, which recently formed a group called UN Data Revolution. Its aim is encouraging governments to make data public for greater accountability, and to tap into data to make "evidence-based" decision." Big data could suddenly become sexy.

By: Gian Volpicelli,

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