Trust and Digital Government - A Few Different Futures
It's not often that a government is seen as a leader in technological innovation or user-friendly systems. But a glowing article in this week's New Yorker looks at experiments with online voting and digital citizenship in tiny Estonia, a former Soviet Republic with 1.3 million in population. The article finds Estonians optimistic about the potential for seamlessly integrated data and connected devices to improve everything from road safety to health care.
Estonia (the birthplace of Skype) has made major investments in recruiting and maintaining tech talent. What's more impressive, this talent is seeking professional fulfillment in government. As opposed to the stereotypical drab bureaucracy, Estonian techies see an opportunity for "digital society building." It's the type of optimism and futurism that we haven't seen in the states for a while. Thanks to European Union regulations giving individuals ownership rights of their personal data (aside from public tax and property records), Estonians seem less apprehensive of potential government overreach or corporate "monetization" of sensitive personal information than Americans.
It's a different story in China, as another article in last month's Wired notes. China's 1.3 billion citizens are preparing for the launch of the "Social Credit System" in 2020. From a purely technological perspective, it sounds familiar - seamlessly integrated data on citizen's health, education, social network connections, etc. It's the policy application of this data that's vastly different. All of these elements combined will create a social credit score of sorts. Citizens with higher scores will have certain privileges that citizens with lower scores will not. The most chilling use of the scoring system comes from the Chinese government's own marketing and lauds the potential for strengthening "sincerity ... in the construction of judicial credibility."
The takeaway here is that "Big Data" is not in itself a savior or a curse. Technology and its effect on societies will only reflect underlying social ideologies and policy systems and can potentially harden them. Consider the United States, somewhere between these two extremes of Estonia's seeming "digital Utopia" and the Orwellian system emerging in China.
We Americans have become quite used to targeted ads based on search histories and online purchases, rarely questioning the ownership rights of corporations like Amazon or Facebook for that information. Our federal government's data collection agencies continue to provide relevant and crucial data on our demographics and economy, even while facing stagnant budgets. And many local governments have done wonders corralling the useful data they collect on tax records and service calls and zoning requests (shout out here to my hometown Charlotte's Open Data Portal).
Still, much of the innovation in streamlining and merging data sources in the United States is focused on corporate monetization. Aside from regulations on particularly sensitive data such as health records, we've largely outsourced data governance to the private sector. Private-sector employment and salary information in the United States, for example, belongs to the employer whereas in the EU individual workers must consent for that data to be re-sold. The implications on how this data might be repackaged and used will vary by society.
It all comes down to political systems of trust and ownership - Estonians own their own data and entrust the government to it, Americans are skeptical of their government but are more willing to entrust the private sector with their information. China's history of government authoritarianism and paternalism is reflected in the new "social credit system," protecting citizens from one another.
Technology might be making the world "flat" in some ways, but it's also reflecting cultural and ideological differences.