Q+A: Can big data be used for good?

Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Sean Aylmer. Big data has become an incredibly powerful tool for businesses, governments, and researchers. But what can it actually tell us, and how can it be used for good? Professor Andreas Chai is Director of Griffith University's Academy of Excellence in Financial Crime Investigation and Compliance. Andreas, welcome to Fear and Greed. Thanks, Sean. Lovely to be here. Let's start with the basics. Define big data. What are you actually talking about?

Oh, look, so big data is effectively anything that you can't analyze in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, to put it in really simple terms. If there's too much stuff to download onto a spreadsheet, then that's like an easy way to think about what's really big.

That is a very easy way to think about it. I'm going to use that forever from now. We've sort of grown up and big data has been around for a while. We still are a bit scared of it. There's still anxiety around it. People hear the term, think about companies tracking what they do. Why do you think it does make us so uncomfortable?

Oh, yeah, look, so there's been a lot of technological innovation way back when during the first Trump election there was the Cambridge Analytica controversy where all of a sudden people using their Facebook apps discovered that they were being used for marketing purposes. So it definitely sort of creates a bit of fear out there. And, you know, data just is very revealing. So there's always this tension in the sense that people don't like it when, you know, that's being used for marketing or manipulation purposes, which is absolutely correct. At the same time, we have this tension that we don't seem to have a problem with giving it away. Every time we click on terms and acceptances, it's sort of, or we get a $50 free voucher, people, you know, tend to go, yep, I'm happy to give away my data. So there's this tension that, you know, there's sort of this murkiness that bad things can come out and jump at you, especially with the breaches that we've had with Optus and other places as well. I think Australia is one of the most hacked countries in the world. So there's a lot of data floating around on the dark web, which can also be used for all sorts of ill-intentioned purposes.

So let's jump to the other side. Let's look at the other side of it. You can actually use data. In fact, what you're doing at Griffith University is trying to kind of look at the shadow economy. So use data to look at that, find out the economic activity that you probably won't be able to see otherwise, how spending patterns reveal what's happening beneath the surface. Just explain what you're doing.

Yeah, that's absolutely correct. So the tables are starting to turn because it's always been the case that it's the bad actors, the criminal organizations or the scammers who are using technology to attack us. So our academy is part of the effort to try and turn things around, to use big data for good or AI for good. So what we are doing is we are using the latest techniques to try and really trace and track and identify where