You’re being watched: How Big Data is changing our lives

Global studies showed that even in 2016, users were interacting with or ‘touching’ their phones thousands of times per day. COVID-19 has exacerbated that trend, for everything from check-ins and vaccination records to banking, ordering food, working and socialising. If you’re anything like the average Australian, you’re spending five and a half hours a day on your phone.
We often think about online data from a personal privacy perspective, which is of course profoundly important. However, it is also important to understand how our collective reliance on data infrastructure and our participation in the digital economy are forming the backbone of new economic, political, and social power – what I call in a paper published on Wednesday by the Lowy Institute “the big data landscape”.

The big data landscape has embedded new structures for unprecedented collection, aggregation and analysis of data about almost every aspect of our lives, as well as new ways to keep us continuously connected. All this data tells a rich story about who we are and what we do. It can provide real-time updates about every aspect of our lives – our physical movements, finances, sexual preferences, mental wellbeing, friends and desires.
Big data democratises capabilities for targeting and surveillance – functions that were previously performed by nation states. The big data digital footprint and the infrastructure used to analyse it is predominantly owned by commercial entities, meaning that the data – and the ability to derive insight from it – largely resides in the private sector….[Read more at: https://www.smh.com.au/national/you-re-being-watched-how-big-data-is-changing-our-lives-20220201-p59st0.html]