insightsthe-rise-in-publicly-available-information

Insights

Corporate Intelligence

Insight

The Rise in Publicly Available Information

What is its Source?

90% of the world’s data was generated in the last 2 years and that data growth is expected to increase by 150% in 2025.[1] The increase in digitalised information has led to a rise in publicly accessible information. This in turn has led to a dilemma – how to verify that the information being generated/uncovered is real/truthful.

The accessibility of the technology has meant that anybody who can use a smart phone can put data out into the public realm through a plethora of social media sites, blog sites, YouTube and social chat. Information generated in this way also gets picked up by other websites, including the many online sites providing corporate details, health information, news reports, celebrity stories and political information to name but a few.  This impacts everyone, whether they are an individual searching online, or those responsible for maintaining databases providing public information, or those working in the information/intelligence gathering sector.

This explosion of information has led to an increasing need for data analysis. It also highlights the downfall of relying on data which is provided by online and database searches only, where a ‘trawl’ of online data is undertaken and everything found is offered up as ‘information’ with little or no analysis.

Data analysis in the Investigations/Intelligence Industry

There can be no discussion about data analysis without discussing the role of AI technology. There are many current debates about whether the upsurge in data and the increasing developments in AI technology will make data analysts obsolete. And whilst AI algorithms can search through large datasets much more quickly than a human brain – for instance, AI is more efficient/faster at extracting patterns in data, at image recognition and processing unstructured data etc – the results of AI searches will still need human analysts to help provide context and help verify the source of the information.   The increasing importance of data and information means that there is an increasing need for analysts to make sense of data. Analysts’ roles will still be pivotal in data-driven companies.

Page Group’s Corporate Intelligence teams does not solely rely on third party databases.  We use in-country sources to obtain publicly available information direct from the relevant source (i.e. courts/corporate registries etc).

These sources on the ground can also give an informed opinion regarding the quality/veracity of smaller online publications as well as the various main stream press (including political bias etc).  They can also analyse and question any the information obtained by undertaking human intelligence enquiries, talking to people who have knowledge of the subject(s) being investigated and asking questions.

[1] https://www.luzmo.com/blog/ai-data-analysis

 

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