In 2025, an estimated 174 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be produced, captured, or replicated online and offline.
For reference, one zettabyte is equivalent to one trillion gigabytes (GB).
If one GB of data is equivalent to about 2 hours of streaming video on YouTube or another service, 174 ZB is equivalent to 348 trillion hours of streaming video
—enough for every person on Earth to watch for about five uninterrupted years, 24 hours a day. Furthermore, by 2025, 75% of the world’s population will be interacting with data every day, on average every 18 seconds.
As mentioned in the 2020 Global Risk Report by the World Economic Forum, data “are increasingly being collected on citizens by government and business alike…these data are then monetized and used to refine the development and deployment of new technologies back toward these citizens, as consumers.”
With so much data being collected and so many new technologies making use of it, it is unsurprising that the subjects—everyday citizens—have begun to scrutinize both the organizations and the methods involved in the process, calling for more transparency about what is being done.
One way in which the trend toward openness and transparency in technology is evident is in the rising number of calls for open data and a more open Internet. In the words of data and intellectual property (IP) privacy lawyer Dr. Paulius Jurcys, one of the key debates in the data privacy space is over who should own personal, cell phone, and smart device data. To him, the answer is simple: “The vast majority of us would agree that individuals should be the owners of the data they generate.”
There are a number of companies and organizations that aim to put control of personal data back into the hands of the users that generate it. For example, “consent management” companies such as Prifina make it possible for phone applications to run using a user’s personal data without that personal data ever leaving the user’s possession. In other words, the application can function without either the application developers or the consent management company ever gaining access to the user’s data.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has set data privacy standards that often require companies to change their operating procedures in order to stay compliant. Consent management platforms such as Piwik Pro and Cookiebot offer software that helps businesses to gather informed consent from their customers and website visitors, along with other related actions.
DuckDuckGo launched in 2008 as an alternative search engine and pledged in 2010 never to track or sell its users’ data. Since then, they have expanded into a full-fledged Internet privacy company, building free mobile and desktop products that allow users to browse the Internet privately and block trackers from websites, email services, and mobile applications. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg describes their work as “building a simple privacy layer for how people use the Internet today, without any tradeoffs. It’s privacy, simplified.”
With 3 billion monthly searches and 5 million monthly software downloads, DuckDuckGo’s numbers are still much smaller than Google’s approximately 1 billion daily active users and 6.9 billion daily searches.
However, the company’s search metrics and user base continue to grow quickly as more and more Internet users look to protect their privacy online.
In June 2021, civic entrepreneur Frank McCourt launched a $100 million initiative called Project Liberty, which aims to build a more equitable and collaborative web.
The project will, among other things, use blockchain to build the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol—a new type of Internet infrastructure that can “democratize social media data.” McCourt describes violations to social media users’ data privacy as one of the motivations for rebuilding the Internet, saying, “I don’t think people until recently understood how fundamentally broken it was and how much damage was being done because of this broken model and the abuse of the data.”
These concepts also tie in with the related concept of the open Internet, which ensures that Internet users can “access the content, applications, and services of their choice,” and “promotes competition among network, services and content providers.”
A key component of an open Internet is net neutrality. Net neutrality requires internet service providers (ISPs), which customers subscribe to in order to access the Internet, to treat all the information that they receive and transmit equally. This means that they cannot block or slow down Internet traffic unless it is necessary for a specific legal, security, or temporary service issue. This rule prevents ISPs from choosing to transmit, withhold, or charge differently for data from certain websites or content based on what it might contain, which would violate the user’s right “to be free to access and distribute information and content, use and provide applications and services of their choice.”
The state of the Internet as a neutral, accessible site for expression, debate, research, and connection (and more!) could falter in the coming years. This depends on many factors, including whether wide-scale data privacy legislation such as the GDPR in the EU is upheld. It also depends on whether net-neutrality laws in Chile, Canada, the United States, and other countries around the world are upheld.
The 2021 Freedom on the Net Internet freedom assessment found that Internet freedom declined globally for the eleventh year in a row.
In the U.S., this decline was linked to widespread misinformation spreading online. In Belarus and Myanmar, government officials targeted online journalists and shut down independent news outlets. In at least forty-five countries, authorities are suspected of obtaining spyware or data extraction technology from private vendors, and officials blocked Internet or social media access in at least twenty countries.
Lastly, it depends partially on how social-media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter continue to influence the way that discourse happens. Because social media has become one of the primary ways in which people receive their news—as well as a prominent discussion forum—these entities have an enormous influence over the flow of information and emotion at a societal level. Therefore, the freedom and neutrality of the space are dependent in part on how responsibly these entities handle that influence. For example, a 2020 Pew Research survey found that 53% of adults in the U.S. “often” or “sometimes” get their news from social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram.
Given that these platforms have the ability to modify information-sharing algorithms and deactivate accounts at will, there are valid concerns about how much power they have to shape political debate and even indirectly cause violence.
+ Gianluca Ariello
An interesting consequence of the more and more frequent use of technological devices in our daily lives is that we are becoming increasingly dependent on them for many tasks. Some studies have been done recently to analyze the effects of this on brain development, especially focusing on the newest generation, which has been feared to be excessively dependent on mobile devices for accessing information and for social interaction. Surprisingly, no negative correlation has been found so far, leaving with the only worry about the possible consequences of not having access - for any reason - to the internet and/or digital devices.
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