GDPR will be tough on technology companies

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the data protection law that is going to be implemented in European Union on May 25^th, 2018. The law is expected to give users more control over their personal data than the existing data privacy laws. However, it will be tough for the technology companies to comply with them.

The main argument of the law is that whenever the technology companies request the users for their data, their requests should be unambiguous. The users should know about all the processed and unprocessed data of the user and should have the right to control or delete that data. Currently, the technology companies also allow to download the data uploaded by the users but do not give any information regarding the data that resulted in using their data. Moreover, the data should be portable that users should be able to port their data from one technology company to another one.

The GDPR law informs the technology companies that how they should take care of the users' privacy. The law also details the fines if the technology companies do not comply with the law. The purpose of penalties in the law is to force the top level of the technology companies to think about privacy of the users as well.

Many organizations are expected to outsource the data related problems to a third party as a result of the law. These third parties will take care of all the privacy issues of the users’ data in the form of a global privacy infrastructure. However, it will be tough for small technology companies to comply with the law or outsource their data privacy issues due to financial reasons.

The critics of the law argue that the law will stop innovate business in European Union that depends upon data and artificial intelligence. Moreover, the law will also affect the technologies companies operating worldwide. The critics are also arguing that GDPR might not help much to the users. Already, many EU users are stuck in law cases with technology companies and technology companies are unable to help them in getting their processed data. The companies will have to restructure their data inventories in order to comply with the law that will highly affect them financially. The biggest challenge to the technology companies will be to comply with the single standard format of storing the users’ data for portability. Changing the format of data storage will certainly affect their working model. However, how much they will be affected? only time will tell.

The mathematical corporation where machine intelligence + human ingenuity achieve the impossible [ Notes from the book]

Book by
Josh Sullivan and Angela Zutavern

---------------------------Summary of what I read on April 3rd, 2018-------------------------------------

In the industrial era, we used the switches and the term “flip the switch” to perform different tasks. In the current era, the largest switch is a machine intelligence. However, modern advancement is not only due to technology-machine learning- but also due to leadership. Leadership with the technology makes the elements of the successful organization to whom we refer as “Mathematical cooperation”.

Mathematical corporations are driven by the data and algorithms. Data and algorithms have made the corporation forward-looking and experimental oriented. The forward-looking is a guide to future power for the organizations. However, none of the organization is mature enough in forward-looking using data but their leaders understand the critical pieces to guide the direction of their organization.

Instead of using big data and artificial intelligence to answer the old known questions regarding the organization, the leaders of the mathematical corporations are using big data and artificial intelligence to answer the unknown question that no one is asking today. Therefore, smart machines along with intelligent imagination of the leaders make “Big minds” that are driving force in mathematical corporations.

Leaders in the industry are all convinced that big mind is disrupting the current business. The power of big minds is predicting the future that can be valuable to their customers. Having the power to predict unknown universe was never available to the leaders of the past.

Why were we restricted in the past? We were restricted with our lack of ability in prediction. The magic of prediction is in viewing the details. In past, we don’t have all the knowledgeable data to understand the wellbeing of the organizations. With data, we are looking the things in detail and are predicting that we don’t know. However, how should we use the data? The answer lies in letting the machine to learn the patterns.  In order to teach machines to find the unknown patterns, we also need the thinking skills to work with the machines and this book is a guide to get the required thinking skills.

Recently, many leaders are turning their traditional organizations to mathematical corporations. Mark Field, CEO of Ford, is among those leaders. He allowed his employees to drive the cars fitted with hundreds of sensors in one of the experiments in the organization to gather and analyze data to better serve the customer needs. Traditionally, the survey-based mechanism is used to gather data from the customers. However, that mechanism is not enough as compared to data generated from sensors to understand the needs of the customer that even they don’t know. According to Mark, organizations work in two parallel worlds: real and digital. The digital world helps in making the real world better by predicting the unknown requirements. Ford is not alone gathering data and serving customers based on the users’ data.

There are many other examples as well. Gathering data from unconventional tools, such as social media has also helped many organization to better serve their customers.  For example, gathering data from social media helped Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) to recall one of its product and improve its reputation among customers. GSK succeed due to emerging new tools for data collection that were not available previously. Therefore, using ever growing new tools of data gathering, mathematical corporations will keep on disrupting business in new ways.