Big Data, Big Problem, Big Bias

Data can do and has done great things to help improve life for people everywhere. That’s accelerated in the digital age as we’ve been able to gather more and more data faster from more people. Learning how to sort and analyze that data quickly has also been a game-changer in forming policy and developing new products. We’ve been able to better target where a problem may lie in a company, which roads need to be fixed, better ways to distribute medicine and the list goes on. Of course, as with so many things, there is a downside. We’ve often looked at how companies can profit off of the data that you generate for them without your consent to gather it in the first place, or even if you have consented to the gathering, you might not appreciate some of the ways that data gets used. Often, a person might withdraw that consent if they knew how it was being utilized. However, there is another downside to the way data is currently handled that we haven’t discussed nearly as much. That would be biases in how it