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by Angela Guess
Alistair Croll recently addressed the problem of companies “cooking their data.” He writes, “Data transparency holds promise. It should, in theory, weed out corruption and level the playing field. Rather than regulating what a company can do, for example, we can regulate what it must share with the world — and then let the world deal with the consequences, whether by boycott, activism, or class-action lawsuit. It’s something the Leading Edge Forum’s Michael Nelson described as a form of digital libertarianism: pacts of transparency between businesses and consumers, or between governments and citizens. He calls it Mutually Assured Disclosure.”
Croll adds, “It’s certainly encouraging to think that corruption and shenanigans wither under the harsh light of data. With information out in the open, it should be easy for interested parties to review the numbers — using cheap clouds and intuitive visualizations — and spot the cheaters.”
He continues, “The first problem open data advocates run into is that of getting real information. Look at Greece: 324 Athenians reported having swimming pools on their taxes. When the government used Google Maps to try and count how many there really were, they found 16,974 of them — despite efforts by citizens to camouflage their pools under green tarpaulins. So even if activists can use widely available data to create change, that data may be wrong.”
photo credit: KFoodaddict
