My Response to a TED Talk by Mallory Freeman

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Hello everyone!

I recently watched a great Ted Talk by Mallory Freeman titled "Your company's data could help end world hunger." In it, she describes her experiences in optimizing trade routes to reduce food costs and, consequently, feed more people. How did she do this? She used data to build a model that identifies the optimal route for food. Freeman's accomplishments are built on data. Without it, she wouldn't be able to make a model to feed thousands more individuals. She is a firm believer that "information visibility drives efficiency." So she proposes three advancements that would benefit humanitarian organizations, tailored to how companies share and manage their internal data and analytics teams.

Companies should:

  • Share data with humanitarian organizations

  • Lend their data scientists/decision scientists who can clean and model data

  • Share their new innovations/technologies to allow for more data collection

Freeman closes her talk discussing how companies can benefit from data philanthropy. Humanitarian organizations use their data to help people in developing countries. These five billion people could be their next customers, and by donating data, more knowledge can be learned about these regions. In her own words, "data philanthropy makes good business sense."

What I Think

I agree with Freeman. With enough data, billions of people's lives could be positively impacted: data models become stronger, insights become clearer, and issues become much more manageable and predictable.

However, I am concerned about privacy issues in data philanthropy. Freeman briefly touches on this; however, in the past decade, since this talk, the issues around data fishing and privacy have grown immensely. A line has been drawn between privacy and humanitarian aid. By donating all of a company's data, as Freeman insists, I believe that line will be overstepped. I see the importance of data, but at this time, when cyberattacks are frequent, donating immense amounts of personal data increases the risk that it falls into the wrong hands. Until data security is fully established, those in possession of personal data are trustworthy, and actions taken with that data are publicly disclosed for confirmation that it is being used justly, I don't believe Freeman's visions can be, and should be, reached.

If you would like to check out the TED Talk where all of this came from, here it is:
https://www.ted.com/talks/mallory_freeman_your_company_s_data_could_help_end_world_hunger?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

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