Billions continue to freely offer their "digital selves" in exchange for services from email to social networking to streaming media to wellness tracking and more, even while the downsides have become clear, impacting everything from our individual psyches to our institutions and our public trust.
In many ways, the business of the built environment has lagged in this revolution, but "spatial data analytics" is blossoming as a sub-discipline, "people analytics" is thriving in the workplace and HR spaces, and "generative" or "data-driven" design has become common parlance of design practitioners.
As a sector, we appear to be catching up, enabled by ubiquitous networked devices, sophisticated and robust data sets (for free and for sale), accessible machine learning toolkits, advanced software, and plain old experience.
As we progress through the adoption curve, what new questions are we asking, from the ethical to the technical? What do stronger data laws mean for our efforts? Does the positive potential of these technologies outweigh the risks — especially the potential for long term social, environmental, and economic gain? Or do we have a greater responsibility to protect individual rights to privacy?