Nearly every technology startup wants the same thing:
more data.
An illustration picture shows a network cable next to a pack of smartphones in Berlin, June 7, 2013. REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
But in the rush to collect all manner of information
about customers, tensions are rising in Silicon Valley over whether such
practices amount to a form of surveillance that customers will ultimately find
invasive.
Whether ordering an Uber, streaming music, shopping
online or tracking a health condition, consumers are giving an unprecedented
amount of information to technology companies.
"The data that companies ... have on you is
significantly greater than you appreciate," Mark Suster, managing partner
at venture capital firm Upfront Ventures, said in an interview at a conference
in Santa Barbara, California, sponsored by CB Insights, a business data firm.
Discussions during the two-day conference centered on
the importance of 'big data,' the catchphrase referring to massive information
sets that are stored and analyzed by companies.
Collecting big data helps Airbnb, for instance, know
whether its customers prefer to travel to the beach or mountains, and Uber
knows popular drop-off locations and how to price trips.
Collecting large amounts of data is also paramount to
developing artificial intelligence (AI), among the most highly sought
technologies in Silicon Valley, which teaches machines to make decisions that
humans previously had. AI can, for example, help a shopper decide on a new pair
of shoes, help a doctor diagnose a disease and enable a car to drive itself.
But questions loom about how much personal information
startups are collecting and how securely they store the data, with whom they
share it and how they intend to use it.
"We are going to become comfortable with a level
of surveillance that we never would have previously been comfortable with,
because it makes things just a little easier," said Jeremy Liew, a venture
capitalist with Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Some startups have overstepped. Uber Technologies Inc
[UBER.UL] faced an investigation by New York's attorney general into a feature
known internally as "God View," which allowed employees to access and
track the location of individual Uber riders without obtaining permission. Uber
settled the matter and agreed to encrypt customers' geo-location data.
Peter Coles, head economist for Airbnb, said the data
his company guards is fairly benign. "I think it is very unlikely that we
would be collecting anything about users that they would be surprised to
know."
But the tension was pronounced in one on-stage
discussion at the conference. Matthew Zeiler, founder and chief executive of
Clarifai, a visual recognition tool used in healthcare, suggested creating a
Wikipedia-style database of anonymous patient data that was open to the public.
"That can be very harmful, especially to the
patients," argued Gabriel Otte, founder and CEO of Freenome, a
cancer-detection startup. Patients would be loath to tell the truth, he said,
if they knew their most private health information was going to end up on the
internet, even without their name attached.
Still, it is unclear if younger generations, who have
grown up with apps such as Facebook and Snapchat that encourage sharing, view
privacy in the same way.
"People don't care as much as they profess,"
Dave McClure, founding partner of 500 Startups, said in an interview.
"Convenience is generally going to win over privacy."
(Reporting by Heather Somerville; Editing by Jonathan
Weber and Bill Rigby)
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