Page 66 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

MONOCLE QUARTERLY JOURNAL | DEEP LEARNING
...Facebook’s baby sister Instagram gathers data by the
40 000 searches per second, for example, imagine how many are of an extremely personal nature, such as, “How do I get over a breakup?” or “What is the best cream for a foot fungus?” Like a digital deity, Google hears every prayer and request, whether it be good, bad or ugly, and catalogues each according to place, time, frequency and hundreds of other possible categories that will increase the value of each and every bit of information gathered.
For Facebook, despite their recent security faux pas, our need to feel and show emotions such as love, anger and sadness on a public forum sees the platform attracting 2.1 billion monthly active users, all sharing their most private and intimate feelings across the network. Simultaneously, Facebook’s baby sister Insta- gram gathers data by the fistful, with regard to ever more analysable images of ourselves and our friends that aid in the company’s quest for the best facial recognition software. Amazon in the meantime, as the stomach of the tech body, knows consumers’ every insatiable desire, including when, where, and how often they need their fix. And Apple, the first ever company to surpass the trillion-dollar market capitalisation threshold, holds its data so dear that even when pressed by the FBI for help in a terrorist investigation, the tech giant still refused to unlock the iPhone in question.
fistful, with regard to ever more analysable images of
ourselves and our friends...
inception is disturbing. In fact, from the outside, market participants and lawmakers are unable to know for certain exactly how much data Google manages to gather, given the company’s very secretive nature towards disclosing the amounts of data they actually store in their data farms. One approximation calculated by Randall Munroe, using conservative estimates garnered from publicly disclosed information such as electricity usage, square footage of data centres, and various expense reports, totalled Google’s stored data at around 15 exabytes – or 15 billion gigabytes – an estimate that is many times larger than any other company’s data footprint, even larger than that of a governmental organisation, such as the NSA.
It is not only the sheer incomprehensible scale of this mountain of data that makes it so incredible, however, but it is also the level of detail and sensitivity of the information that makes this data so unique. Of those
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