There's a huge economic incentive in having this data available - predict markets, sell or provide predictions to businesses, understand what your citizens are thinking at any point in time... Facebook, twitter, et. al. are all sitting on gold mines as well. Ignoring the privacy concerns (which are substantial) this would be an amazing set of data to work with. I'm not surprised there are people willing to do this.
An interesting article [1] was published in Nature a few days ago. I haven't read the entire paper yet but the abstract claims, "group-level ability to produce complex innovations is maximized when social information is easy to acquire and when individuals are organized into large and partially connected populations." Imagine the innovations and industries that would be created if all the information governments and corporations are sitting on were freely available.
I hope there will eventually be a broad 'free data' movement. If Google and Facebook are secretly pushing propoganda that privacy is dead (as stated in some conspiracy theory I recently saw on HN), and if these campaigns work, then the public will eventually not mind having their data open and available. But they should mind that it's all locked behind closed doors. Data is power! Do we want these massive corporations or governments to have so much power over the economy? Should they hinder social and technological progress by keeping their data unavailable? I have no answers but I think these problems will grow in time.
You bring up two very interesting and powerful phenomena: "siren servers" and "social physics".
The first term is used by Jaron Lanier to describe computer systems that, like "sirens" of the sea, lure everyone into their beautiful environs, collect all of the data on them, and statistically model all of this data in ways that effectively master the nature of this individual - her beliefs, her abilities, her emotions - until ultimately that individual is made both completely vulnerable and completely powerless. Lanier's book is intentionally provocative and controversial, while rather intelligent and compassionate in its spirit, and I recommend checking it out: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Future-Jaron-Lanier/dp/145165....
The second term comes from a talk at Google in 2014 called "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMBl0ttu-Ow) by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland. He describes research supporting the recent Nature publication you link to on social and cultural progress, which concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services across nations, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His statistical modeling results really strongly show - "like a law" - that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society.
It's really interesting to consider how we could concentrate on using all of the data and models to make deep positive impacts on our society, while respecting our human dignity. To quote Pope Francis's address to the U.N. today: "Integral human development and the full exercise of human dignity cannot be imposed. They must be built up and allowed to unfold for each individual, for every family, in communion with others, and in a right relationship with all those areas in which human social life develops – friends, communities, towns and cities, schools, businesses and unions, provinces, nations, etc."
An interesting article [1] was published in Nature a few days ago. I haven't read the entire paper yet but the abstract claims, "group-level ability to produce complex innovations is maximized when social information is easy to acquire and when individuals are organized into large and partially connected populations." Imagine the innovations and industries that would be created if all the information governments and corporations are sitting on were freely available.
I hope there will eventually be a broad 'free data' movement. If Google and Facebook are secretly pushing propoganda that privacy is dead (as stated in some conspiracy theory I recently saw on HN), and if these campaigns work, then the public will eventually not mind having their data open and available. But they should mind that it's all locked behind closed doors. Data is power! Do we want these massive corporations or governments to have so much power over the economy? Should they hinder social and technological progress by keeping their data unavailable? I have no answers but I think these problems will grow in time.
[1] http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9398.epdf?shared_access...