The data revolution: privacy, politics and predictive policing

Medical Transformation and Outcomes

• Over 90% of the world's data was generated in the past two years, fundamentally altering healthcare delivery.
• Viz.ai, a machine learning tool, analyzes brain scans to detect strokes in a fraction of the time required by traditional manual analysis.
• In the Nick Bowers case at Erlanger Hospital, Viz.ai identified a clot blocking blood flow within seconds, enabling immediate thrombectomy surgery that restored full blood flow and reversed brain damage.
• Dr. Tom Devlin notes that shaving minutes off diagnosis time is critical, as every hour of delay in stroke treatment negatively impacts patient survival and recovery.
• Carol Reed became the world's first patient to have real-time brain monitoring during open-heart surgery to detect intraoperative clots.
• AI-powered healthcare services were projected to reach a market value of $6.6 billion by 2021, promising to treat and cure significantly more patients.

Data Collection and Surveillance Expansion

• Personal data collection has expanded from 2.5 billion smartphone users to a projected 31 billion connected devices worldwide by 2020.
• Data generation now occurs continuously, including via wearables tracking GPS, movement, and pulse, as well as through city-wide Wi-Fi networks and CCTV cameras.
• In the modern data economy, individual data points generated by web activity, physical movement, and financial transactions are aggregated to build consumer profiles for targeted advertising.
• Even with privacy regulations like the EU's GDPR, anonymized data remains vulnerable to de-anonymization through cross-referencing unique behavioral "fingerprints."

Electoral Integrity and Political Influence

• During the 2016 US presidential election, the Trump campaign reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars on micro-targeting voters via social media data.
• Cambridge Analytica utilized personal data from 50 million Facebook users without consent to build psychographic profiles and influence voting behavior.
• Following public outcry, British authorities raided Cambridge Analytica's offices in March 2018 on suspicion of unlawful data handling.
• David Carroll, a digital activist, is litigating in British courts to compel Cambridge Analytica to disclose its data processing methods and user profiles.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg faced Congressional scrutiny in April 2018 regarding the company's failure to inform users of privacy violations.

Law Enforcement and Predictive Policing Disputes

• The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) utilizes "PredPol," an algorithm that analyzes past crime type, location, and time to predict crime hotspots within 500-by-500-foot zones.
• LAPD is also trialing "Operation Laser," a system that assigns risk scores to ex-offenders to predict the likelihood of re-offending and monitor high-risk individuals.
• Researchers from Cornell University identified that predictive policing algorithms suffer from "feedback loops," causing police to repeatedly patrol the same neighborhoods regardless of actual crime rates.
• The "Stop LAPD Spying Coalition" argues that predictive data is inherently biased against Black and low-income communities, leading to racial profiling and harassment.
• Activists demanded a public audit of LAPD programs, noting they had to spend $400,000 in litigation costs to force transparency regarding the algorithms' operations.
• LAPD officials acknowledged potential biases in reported crime statistics but maintained that data-driven policing is essential for resource allocation and crime deterrence.

State Surveillance and Social Credit Systems

• China is implementing a national Social Credit System to monitor the trustworthiness of 1.4 billion citizens based on compliance with social norms and rules.
• The system tracks both online and offline behavior, with potential punishments for minor infractions such as jaywalking, smoking on trains, or obstructing sidewalks.
• By the time of the report, 12 million individuals had been placed on travel bans or blacklists due to low social credit scores, such as unpaid court fines.
• Journalist Leo Hu was restricted from buying property and using high-speed trains after being blacklisted in 2017 for a dispute over a court fine payment.
• In Western democracies, checks and balances theoretically exist to prevent similar exploitation, though critics argue that official institutions remain unsupervised and capable of arbitrary data use.