Knight News Challenge: Data from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Gus Hosein is executive director of Privacy International, an international nonprofit that advocates for strong protections for privacy and controls on surveillance in the digital age. He shares his thoughts on the question posed by the Knight News Challenge on Data: How might we make data work for individuals and communities? Winners of the challenge will share in $3 million. Apply at newschallenge.org. The challenge closes at 5 p.m. ET today, Sept. 30.

Data is generated by people. Data is about people. And data is used to judge people.

It is a key ingredient to intelligence. Intelligence is about people, events and things. It can create power imbalances.

The hope of the data movement is that data will create new opportunities for people to understand and engage with the world around them. But let’s imagine there are two types of key people in the coming stages of this domain: data users and data generators. 

For data users, those in the data revolution who want to liberate data and make new uses for innovative purposes, I beg you to be open about the data used, the logic, and the inferences and results. People may not even know their data has been made open. So the onus is on data users to make it all transparent for us all to see and understand.

Meanwhile for data generators, i.e. the rest of us, please demand to be made to understand how you are generating data and demand to know who is gaining access to that data and what it can be used for. The days of where you see closed-circuit cameras and read signs about the fact they’re in operation and by whom, are nearly over. Data is generated by our devices without our knowledge, by other devices we do not see, by apps and services beyond our control even when they claim to empower us. The burden should be upon the manufacturers of our devices, apps, services and platforms.

Both data users and generators need more than this, however. We need to stem the tide of data generation for two reasons. 

First, and most obvious, the data is hardly ever secure. This means that there are insecure and uncontrolled processes around the creation and sharing of data that will generate countless future problems. Whether it is the smart TV that is leaking all your voice communications or viewing habits to the manufacturers and anyone else in between, or the smart device and camera that can be easily hijacked. 

Second, we must not feed the monsters with ambitions to be tomorrow’s intelligence factories. Today’s intelligence agencies have proven to be above the law as they are able to compel and contrive access to raw and seemly innocuous data and glean intelligence that makes them worthy of their billion-dollar budgets because our governments fear too much any sense of blindness. Tomorrow’s intelligence factories will not be restricted to governments, or even the Internet companies we have grown accustomed to interacting with. They will be a conglomerate of the two, beyond the reach of law and beyond our recognition and yet they accumulate data to understand us and the world. They will share their intelligence judiciously, but not because of democratic oversight but because of the knowledge of the power they hold. This inequity of power against us, the data generators, once created, will be hard to control. Our data will be exploited, and consequently, we shall be as well.  

There are ways to prevent this data exploitation. Stemming the tide and asserting controls over data generation and even the sharing of the most innocuous data is absolutely essential. Ensuring transparency of processes is another essential act.  

With greater awareness as a start, the case for change can become clearer. We propose that the world needs a compilation of these security challenges so that these can be apparent as a clear articulation of risk when the salesmen of the exploitative future speak of connecting everything and await with glee the future they can dominate. We must go beyond the academic analysis and impenetrable security jargon to connect this issue with the public. The public — oops, “data generators” — need to be shown classes of exploitative practices to appreciate that these are not isolated incidents but rather, if left unchecked, a sign of things to come.

Knight Foundation is collaborating on the Knight News Challenge on Data with Data & Society and Open Society Foundations. Apply and give feedback on other projects at newschallenge.org. The deadline for submissions is 5 p.m. today, Sept. 30. Winners will be announced in January 2016.