“Only the beginning of massive global digitalisation”

“What we are seeing is only the beginning of massive global digitalisation, but it is happening rapidly”, says Stefan Larsson, sociology of law researcher and director of the Lund University Internet Institute.

“I believe we are going to see extensive development of methods in the social sciences and humanities that are related to digitalisation – both qualitative and quantitative. Big, complex data will no doubt play an important role in that.”

Stefan Larsson says that traditional methods will remain important for interpreting and understanding social and cultural phenomena, but other methods can complement or enhance these because our movements on the internet are stored to such a massive extent.

However, the way science is organised has not kept up. If academia is to be a relevant interpreter of society, interdisciplinary research needs to be better taken into account in internal funding allocations, and new categories of accomplishments need to be attributed more weight than old ones.

“Faculties and departments function like islands that don’t know a lot about each other. In order to understand and deal with phenomena such as online hate crimes, we need to break out of our disciplines and work closely together across law, engineering, and cultural and behavioural sciences.”

Stefan Larsson and his colleagues at the Lund University Internet Institute have carried out a number of projects on ‘open data’ – providing greater access to data. They are currently finalising a handbook on the legal aspects of open data, which will help public organisations to maintain openness in a digitalised society.

As regards public research data, a lot of it will be open – this is the ambition expressed by both Sweden and the EU (see article on previous page).

“The large quantities of data generated by Facebook, Twitter and Google, for example, will only partly be available for research, and possibly only for those who are able to pay or access it in other contexts. However, there are other important areas in which data can be collected that are not of interest to private companies”, according to Stefan Larsson.

More and more information about us is being stored in databases, either in large medical registers or in the digital footprint we leave on the internet. Can we be sure that this data is not misused and that confidentiality is maintained?

“It is hard to say, because there is a difference between medical registers and, say, databases held by Facebook or service providers. However, in general it is true that in a connected world there is a risk that information stored in databases can get out. It doesn’t have to be through criminal activity; it could be due to negligence or simply accident. Data could also become a commodity and be exchanged in security negotiations between states”, says Stefan Larsson.

Under Swedish law, all service providers must store network traffic data for six months – metadata on when and with whom we talk on the telephone, where we are and who we email.

“This data reveals a lot about us and different parties are fighting over it. In particular, information linked to geographic data, showing where we are, can be used in criminal investigations. However, storing this data does entail a form of mass surveillance, including of those who have not committed a crime, which threatens or invades personal privacy.”

The EU directive on which the Swedish law is based has been appealed to the Court of Justice, which in turn has rejected the directive because it invades the privacy of individuals. The result? An investigation is underway…

The issue of privacy is very interesting, but do people care? Both yes and no, according to Stefan Larsson. While norms are developing on what one ‘ought’ not to share on social media, many people are unaware of how personal data is stored and used by major internet companies. It is also much more difficult to react to sometimes extremely serious reports of abstract happenings behind the scenes, especially if we think of Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the NSA (National Security Agency).

“Last summer, an article was published by researchers working at Facebook about an experimental study on over 600 000 users in which changes were made to their news feeds to see how that affected the emotional state of the users, without their knowledge. This is completely new. We have never before seen this type of measurement that delves deep into our psyche and even to some extent controls what we feel.”

Text: Britta Collberg

Facts

How much do we use the Internet?

2012: Internet users worldwide 34 per cent, in Europe 63 per cent, in Sweden 89 per cent.

2013: 60 per cent of Swedish citizens had a smartphone. Of those aged 12–15, 78 per cent used one on a daily basis. Around half of Swedes were members of Facebook and in the most active age range, 16–25 year olds, 76 per cent used Facebook on a daily basis.

In 2013 the world’s most popular search engine, Google, had almost six billion searches a day.