Using Our Tech Capabilities For Good
Every website you visit takes note of your clicking, this can be avoided by opting out – or instead use these cookies for good with Data Does Good.
No matter what you’re using the internet for—shopping, communicating or entertainment—it’s basically impossible not to amass a data trail on the way. On the whole, internet users have been cautioned to be careful when it comes to their data trail and even fear what might potentially happen with it.
In many ways, this is good advice, but it also wastes an opportunity to use your data in positive ways. In the growing ‘tech for good’ movement’ there are a number of initiatives that have been developed that aim to put user data to work for a good cause.
Data History Proceeds
The first comes from two Stanford Business School students who thought of an ingenious way to put Amazon shopping histories to work. The “Data Does Good” project sells an anonymized and encrypted version of users’ shopping histories to brands, marketers and retailers. It then takes the funds from that sale and donates them to a non-profit of the user’s choice. All the user has to do is fill out a basic information form, including age and income, and then upload their Amazon history to the site. The company is run as what is called a public benefit corporation, which means once its basic operating costs are met, it donates the rest to charity.
Data Does Good is a great example of “opt-in” tech for good. In other words, all the consumer must do is consent to allow information that already exists to be use in another way, free of charge. The founders saw the untapped potential of this resource, and instead of monetizing it for themselves, they mobilized it for a good cause.
As the company’s founder, Scott Steinberg, told Mashable, “This resource — your data — is something that everyone has, whether you’re a low-income person living in an urban city center or a parent of three of a rural area. This is something everyone has and everyone can use. We’re really excited about this as not just a new way to raise money for valuable causes, but as a way to allow everyone, across the demographic spectrum, to participate in fundraising.”
Helping Habits
Another example of data collection being put to a noble rather than commercial cause is the way that the London Underground uses its wifi network data as a mechanism to study and understand passenger movement—and thus improve service on the network. This took place last year, when Transport for London (TfL) announced they would a four-week trial where they would be collecting wifi data “in order to better understand how London Underground passengers move through stations and interchange between lines.”
This may sound scary, but the MAC data was anonymized and encrypted. Furthermore, TfL wasn’t collecting what passengers were doing on its wifi network, but instead they were interested in analyzing “the date and time of the connection, the device connection status and the individual access point they connected to, and therefore the London Underground station and location within a station where the device connected.”
Anonymized and Accessible
You might wonder what TfL wanted to do with this particular range of information. As Gizmodo explained, it was all about better understanding how passengers use the network, with the hope of improving it: “At the moment, TfL can tell what station you started and ended your journey at based on your Oyster card – but it can’t tell how you got between two locations. It sometimes supplements this data with a Rolling Origins Destination Survey (RODS) to figure out specific routes, but this is done manually, which is expensive and time consuming. So one immediately obvious benefit of the wifi data is being able to collect the same data much faster, on a larger scale, and for a fraction of the cost.”
This particular example of urban computing meets tech for good illustrates how allowing our data to be used in aggregate can improve the flow of our transport and urban centers. It will be exciting to see how this field continues to grow and evolve especially with the added stress increased passenger numbers is causing. We might fear Big Data but used with the right intention it may well transform our lives in very positive ways. What do you think?