your own data science

It was not even long ago when the soon to become IT giants were a force for good. Google showed us where everything was, no privileges needed -anymore- to find whatever information exists. Facebook connected us with whoever we wanted to befriend, collaborate, or learn from, in activism without borders and beyond the imagination. Apple provided devices that, once and for all, did not crash when bringing internet to your pocket first and to your wrist later. What else could we ask for?

Well, we could have asked for some more from ourselves. For one, we could have been a bit less naive. It is impossible that companies making trillions of hard currency would not be co-opted by big capitals, the military or hostile regimes elsewhere and everywhere. Now it seems that every other day there is another instance of facebook selling private and personal information to yet another business or evil politician or that google researched into yet another weaponized use of big data and artificial intelligence. We should not have expected otherwise.

Yet pessimism is never enough, and it’s certainly no fun. It is too easy to be pessimist, it is too easy to be right. Being a data scientist myself I have it easier than other professionals: I know how much damage you could do with the right analysis… or with the wrong one. Yet I think that we need to be optimist. In this new world order, where the big information giants can know everything about us, there are reasons to be optimist.

To begin somewhere, as much as those IT monsters have access to a lot of data, we do too. Just take the headlines of your newspaper of preference, and choose one. If you want, with a bit of online searching you can check not only the veracity of the news behind the title, but also its source. Few clicks more and you get alternative takes on the same facts. You need neither a degree in journalism nor data analysis to reach and make intelligent use of the information online. Two decades ago that level of checking was impossible for anybody outside a newspaper redaction or a big university. Now is in front of you, in the same device that you are using to read me. No extra hardware, software of college degree needed.

Take that thought and project it to the public sphere. There is no doubt that populism is making big strides at both sides of the Atlantic. As it goes for populism from the right or the left, most of their statements are based in half truths or straight lies. Yet today any of us can dismantle any fake. As a matter of fact, if you live in pretty much every other country with a modern government, you will have public institutions with websites that curates information objectively. Or you have the government of your neighbor countries to cross check whatever yours publishes. Take unemployment, and hear a politician saying that is on the raise or in the mend, depending on his preferred perspective. You need not to believe him anymore. If you live in Europe https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat will give you pretty much every other number that your politician used, or misused. Check it up, right now. You need not to have any data scientists powers. Is the number not present? then go to your national statistics office, which will have the detailed info. Or to any agency of the United Nations, World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, whom have been updating their data websites in the last years.

Just like this example, similar cases are to be made in education, health or any other theme that politicians like to argue about. It is true that big data has granted unthinkable powers to the big capital. But it did the same to us, individuals. The question is not how bad are those IT giants. The question is when are we going to realize that they have make us immune… to themselves. Data does not only belong to us, but it is available to us, right now. Use it!