For the past decade, most public debates about data have revolved around a familiar anxiety: too much of our personal information is being collected from our records and our online activity, and then shared and monetised. That concern has not gone away. But a shift is now under way – towards synthetic data.
Increasingly, data used by governments, hospitals, banks and technology companies to make decisions about the people they serve is not gathered directly from real people and events. It can be synthetic: generated by computer models that learn the statistical patterns in a real dataset and then produce artificial records that follow the same patterns. The aim is to keep the data useful while reducing the risk that individuals can be identified.
