Since the coronavirus pandemic took over, people around the world have been hearing and reading about 'flattening the curve.' While simply referencing a graph of COVID-19 infections or deaths plotted against time, it is data, and if coronavirus has taught us anything, it is that data is crucial to solving the challenges facing a highly-interconnected world. However, under the current circumstances, there is a danger that most of the world's data will continue to be owned by so few companies.

This is not ideal considering how influential data can be in political, economic, and scientific decision-making. Companies who own the data on people's interests, issues and preferences will be able to outdo their rivals when it comes to advertising or investment decisions. Social issues are also business opportunities for companies with the right solutions, even if the dividends are not immediate. For instance, experts predict that companies like Apple and Google are likely to come out of the crisis more influential than ever before. Coronavirus contact tracing, proximity alerts and mapping apps are technologies built on big data, and this often comes from location information collected by tech giants, including Facebook and Google. Two companies who track quite a lot of online user information already. The widespread use of these newer tools will, in turn, help tech companies collect invaluable data that they can rely on when evolving their own products and services.

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This situation could result in an even greater widening of the already deep data inequality issue. In fact, the expectation of this outcome recently prompted a surprise response from one of the big tech companies. Microsoft has now launched an Open Data Campaign, in collaboration with the Open Data Institute and The Governance Lab, to deal with data inequality among companies, as well as regions. The campaign aims to facilitate open and secure sharing of large-scale data, and especially information that could help in tackling some of the biggest challenges facing society, like healthcare, sustainability, and urban socioeconomic issues. Microsoft has declared that it is going to be part of more than twenty data projects to help fight the data divide issue and this number includes some of its own projects, such as the Airband initiative, which looks to improve broadband connectivity in the US. In addition, Microsoft says it will share datasets from the project openly on GitHub and will publish the results of its COVID-19 research project, aimed at decoding the response of the immune system to the virus.

Data Inequality Is Real & The Divide Is Widening

Microsoft researchers have found that less than 100 companies collect more than 50 percent of the data produced today. These companies profit enormously from this, while highlighting the staggering divide in data ownership right now. However, it is not just about the economic inequality that such a situation creates, as data ownership also gives considerable political power to companies, and Facebook is a perfect example. The social media giant's effectiveness at swaying political opinion is down to how much information it has access to. Facebook's unique platform allows the company to customize content to suit individual interests, making it a perfect delivery system for targeted political ads.

However, this need not be the case and big data can be a force for good. For that to happen, data needs to be usable, openly shared, securely stored, and not a threat to the privacy of individuals. Microsoft's campaign is just the latest in the list of recent open data projects intent on helping with that. In fact, the pandemic period has witnessed widespread open publishing of research to enable scientists all over the world to work on the issue. One of the major initiatives is the Folding@Home's open-science project which intends to simulate protein folding in viruses, thus helping to design drugs that might cure specific issues, like COVID-19 and Cancer. Even among tech companies, open publishing of research is catching up, with the likes Google now sharing its work on open repositories, including arXiv.org.

Going forward, data is going to play a significant role in shaping society. From climate action and curing deadly diseases to fighting crime and solving severe socioeconomic issues, data-driven AI tools will be key in finding ways to overcome these global challenges. Until then, if data remains disproportionately concentrated in the hands of a few, the world is unlikely to solve these issues, and the economic disparity will continue to get worse in the post-coronavirus world.

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Source: Microsoft