When company data saved lives
Three times ordinary company data, made for something else, ended up doing public good.
Picture made for ABURA Bureau.
After the Haiti earthquake. In 2010, the mobile operator Digicel shared anonymised location records from 1.9 million SIM cards. Researchers used them to show that about 630,000 people left Port-au-Prince within 19 days, a far better match for a later UN survey than the official estimates, and they mapped movements within 12 hours during the cholera outbreak that followed.
Against cancer. Drug companies and research groups pooled de-identified patient data from completed cancer trials on one free platform. By October 2014 it held data from 14 trials covering about 9,000 patients, data that would otherwise have sat unused.
In the weather forecast. Airlines' aircraft send weather readings as they fly. Europe's main forecasting centre found they gave 13% of the value of all its observations in 2019, and when flights collapsed in 2020, removing aircraft data made some forecasts up to 15% worse.
Shared research data has even trained Nobel-winning AI: AlphaFold2, which predicts the shapes of proteins, learned from the public databases of known protein structures.
In each case, the safeguard came first: data anonymised, de-identified or aggregated so that no one could be singled out. That is what made sharing possible.
The UN calls this data philanthropy, and EU law now recognises data altruism. If your data could do good like this, giving it is one option, alongside leasing or licensing it.
Find out what your data could be worth
Start on abura.io- Bengtsson and others, PLOS Medicine 8(8) (2011)
- Green and others, "The Project Data Sphere Initiative", The Oncologist 20(5) (2015)
- ECMWF, "Drop in aircraft observations could have impact on weather forecasts" (24 March 2020)
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024, press release
- UN Chronicle, "A Decade of Leveraging Big Data for Sustainable Development" (2018)
- EU Data Governance Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/868
