It has informed government policies and helped businesses finetune their own offerings, especially as they’ve pivoted their offerings to consumers during the pandemic.
Data has assisted Australia on its road to recovery and helped us cope with structural shifts as more people work from home. It has also helped business and government better understand how these shifts are playing out across the nation.
Anonymised data
And importantly, it’s helped society respond more quickly to change as we’ve had faster access to information and, with that information, we’ve been able to adjust quickly.
At NAB, Cadness says the bank has shared its anonymised aggregated data with government, which has helped provide clarity around which segments of the economy have been the most affected by COVID-19.
“When we have emerged from lockdowns, we can see what the impact is within a couple of days and where people are spending their money.
“Now while that’s one aspect of data use, another is to help our larger business customers in particular, navigate their way through what trends they’ve seen. What will help them understand what’s the biggest bricks and mortar footprint for them and what does online spending look like?
“They can use data to inform their strategic decisions and also see what the impact of those decisions are as well,” Cadness says.
Yet while the narrative around data capture and its use has been primarily quite positive coming out of the pandemic, the flip side is we’re also starting to ask the larger hard questions associated with data collection and privacy.
We live in a new era where the idea of our feelings being for sale is suddenly a reality.
Author and Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Shoshana Zuboff says we live in the digital century during the formative years of information civilization.
“Our time is comparable to the early era of industrialisation, when owners had all the power, their property rights privileged above all other considerations,” Zuboff says.
She says the danger is companies can now “stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioural data”.
Writing in The New York Times earlier this year, Zuboff suggested we live in a new era where the idea of our feelings being for sale is suddenly a reality. Humanity has never thought of feelings being for sale because they’re inalienable, but now our fears or thoughts are considered fodder for an algorithm and are just “another data point in the trillions that are fed to the machines” every day.
According to Zuboff, the challenge for democracies is we now “have a democratic information civilisation to build, and there is no time to waste”.
Cadness agrees much has to be done as we’re on a journey to build out our digital future and we’re still learning.
“Privacy laws have tried to be technology-neutral, but it can be hard for the law to keep pace with this fast-emerging technology. The EU, for example, is proposing businesses like NAB spend a lot of time thinking about the responsibilities they have with people’s data.
“At NAB we have a data privacy and ethics team who we work very closely with so we better understand our role as custodians of the data and its intrinsic value. It’s something we are very thoughtful about as are the wider business community,” Cadness says.
And as long as business and government continue to keep the importance of privacy and ethics top of mind, Cadness is very positive about the future.
“We absolutely must keep businesses to account in terms of transparency and how we use data and if we get it right it’s only going to benefit our customers, the community and society as whole,” Cadness says.
Special Report: Digital investment
Read full report:
Networks: Businesses must bank on secure future
Digital infrastructure: A new asset class is shaping up
Assets: Digitisation of finance is the next frontier for investors
Industry insight: Comment from NAB’s David Gall
Transactions: Seamless payment systems heating up
