time to get personal over data
TRANSCRIPT
5 October 2013 | NewScientist | 5
EDITORIAL
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THE latest scientific report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published last week, was received almost with a shrug. There were no real showstoppers (no surprise, as most of the report had been leaked in advance). Minds were not changed. Battle lines did not budge. Denialists tried to rubbish the report but found themselves preaching only to the converted.
Perhaps the juiciest morsel was the IPCC’s acceptance that warming has slowed since 1998 (see page 6). Even this has been widely studied and debated elsewhere; the IPCC simply reiterated that the change can be explained as part of the complex interactions between natural and human-made climate effects, with the big picture unchanged. The report is the product of painstaking consensus-building; it is inevitably not cutting-edge.
That is not to say the science is “settled”. Science never is. Many uncertainties and complexities remain to be understood, but the chances that we will discover that we have got the big picture wrong are diminishing day by day. The work of climate scientists
is now to fill in ever-finer details. So why are we still so uncertain what the future holds?
The greatest source of uncertainty is not science, but society: the IPCC’s declaration that the world will warm by anywhere between 0.3 and 4.8 °C reflects social and political uncertainties, not scientific ones.Climate scientists study the climate. They cannot tell us how
much money will be invested in green energy R&D, whether fertility rates will go up or down, whether we will dig up all the remaining fossil fuels and burn them, or the outcomes of numerous other decisions that affect the atmosphere – though they can tell us what will probably happen if we do or don’t take them (see page 8).
And so attention must now turn to the next two IPCC reports. The first of these, due out in March 2014, will cover impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; the second, out the following month, will cover mitigation.
As yet there are no leaks from these reports. They are likely to develop the theme that the future is still in our hands. We can choose to limit warming, or continue our carbon bender and take our chances in a world that is around 5 °C hotter. It’s up to us. n
The world is in our handsThe greatest source of climate uncertainty is political, not scientific
IT IS one of the biggest scandals of the past decade, and yet ongoing revelations about surveillance by the US National Security Agency have yet to fundamentally affect the way we choose to handle our personal data. Search engines that do not log user searches as Google does (such as DuckDuckGo) have seen a surge in traffic. But they still handle only a tiny proportion of web searches.
Why don’t people seem to care? One important reason is that very few of us really understand, let alone control, the vast, intangible and invisible data trail we leave behind as we navigate the digital world. Perversely, internet companies and government agencies often understand what we’re giving up better than we do.
Now technical fixes are starting to arrive to help us gain control over this trail. OpenPDS, for example, is a repository that alerts consumers to data requests from companies or intelligence agencies (see page 20).
Such solutions are helpful to those who are privacy-conscious and tech-savvy enough to use them. Even if they become easy to use, however, people may still consider that the exchange of data for services such as social media and email is a good deal. But do the users of these services really understand what they have given up? Consumers have largely sleepwalked into giving their data away. Perhaps the status quo is OK, but it has not yet been subject to a proper public debate.
Netizens might become more interested in that debate if the value of their data was more widely appreciated. It is a valuable resource – and not just to advertisers, snoops and spooks. The data can be used to improve public services such as transport, and promises to transform the social sciences with an unprecedented flood of information about how people go about their daily lives.
One of the obstacles in running these analyses is gathering the data itself, because it is jealously guarded by the communications companies that provide us with services. Even if we don’t really care about the privacy of our personal data, we should still care who owns it. n
Time to get personal over data
“The chances of discovering that we have got the big picture wrong are diminishing day by day”