Figure 3-3-2-5 Situations where it is acceptable to provide personal data (by purpose of use)

Will provide ___ Will provide with conditions ___ Will not provide under any circumstances

(Source) "Study Report on the Social Impacts of ICT Advancement," MIC (2014)

## Section 4 Advent of a Real Data-Driven Society

### 1. Signs of changes in data usage

A succession of data usage examples are appearing in many disparate fields due to the improved performance and lower prices of various devices and sensor technologies, which are being driven by advances in ICT. Concurrent with this, data usage in many industries and fields is being pushed by the construction of environments that link all sort of things around us together, which is being driven by M2M and IoT technologies.

Conversely, most analysis using data to date has been to “visualize” operational statuses or the state of the company by collecting and aggregating various data sets distributed among various internal sections of a company. Nevertheless, some corporations answered that they obtaining benefits by further deepening their data usage.

In addition, corporations have mainly performed data analyses using internal corporate or internal organization data sets only. But there is every reason to believe there will be increased efforts to obtain new insight by using external data sets and contrasting them with internal data sets. And the external data sets getting the most attention are public data sets held by government bodies. As much as corporations have high hopes for open data, open data initiatives are important for governments too, from the viewpoints of improving transparency and credibility, encouraging public-private cooperation, and making administration more efficient. For these reasons, the pace of open data initiatives is expected to accelerate further.

Data that users communicate via social media and elsewhere are also likely to be used as important data resources in conceiving management strategies and developing product and service plans. These trends, taken together, will probably accentuate the infrastructure-like nature of data, as data sets transcend the limitations of being management resources belonging to a single corporation or organization and are shared throughout society.

### 2. Issues complicating data usage advancement

The advancement of data usage, however, is not free of problems. The most commonly acknowledged across-the-board issues are the handling of personal data and securing specialized data personnel.

For the corporations and other organizations engaged in data usage, the higher the value of data they obtain and analyze, the greater the received benefits. From this standpoint, then, if data directly tied to users can be used, it will be possible to directly ascertain the user's attitudes and tendencies, which is valuable to corporations and other organizations. On the flip side, for consumers, this creates concerns about violations of their privacy and misuse and abuse of their personal information by third parties. A key issue is how to strike the right balance between the usage and protection of personal data.

It is important, in order to obtain more value from data usage, for corporations and other organizations to secure personnel who can derive beneficial insights from processed data and who can apply these insights to resolve issues at the corporation / organization. It is said, particularly in Japan, that there are insufficient numbers of these specialized personnel. To be fair, different corporations require different levels of data usage