Giving Away Personal Information for the Better

The Balance Between Privacy and Societal Good

In our digital age, there is a delicate tug-of-war being played between our personal information and the potential benefits it can provide to governments and businesses. Navigating this balance requires us to carefully consider the potential harms but also advantages sharing our personal data can bring.

There is a thin line between privacy and security. We are willing to give away so much but not too much. We often consent to have our data collected on websites that tracks our likes and dislikes which sometimes can be quite useful. This can be taken a step further. How about cameras that monitor our facial expressions as we browse through a list of online products? What about sensors on our keyboard and mouse that pick up changes in movement? This seems like the reflection of an overly-commercialised world, which sadly could be ours. Privacy is clearly being breached here, despite the algorithm fundamentally processing numbers, whether it is likes, images or mouse speed, the direct connection between the algorithm and our body makes us uncomfortable.

There are some cases, however, where giving away more data can be useful. Take healthcare as an example. Imagine we have a global database that tracks the health outcomes of every individual given their clinical and environmental factors. We can apply sophisticated algorithms on such data to help inform us of possible diagnoses and prognoses. We can…