This is the second article in a multipart series.

COVID-19 and the worldwide response to the pandemic are accelerating all kinds of trends. Telemedicine, for example, has gone from an essential tool in rural areas to a mainstream health care option everywhere. Online video meetings and webinars have become a fixture—for business, education, families, and fun.

One of the most significant, complex, far-reaching—and accelerating—trends is the rise of data sharing, particularly data from the Internet of Things. In B2C businesses, marketers and tech companies have long shared data to better discern and address evolving customer needs and behaviors. In B2B, industrial and tech companies collaborate on data sharing to create new platform-based business models and services. Now countries around the world are tying together disparate data sets—cellphone location data, credit card information, CCTV imagery, point-of-sale data, and health data—in an effort to track the novel coronavirus and trace those who have come into contact with infected individuals. As we look forward to the easing of social-distancing requirements—which will necessitate testing, tracing, isolation, and treatment—technology solutions are a critical tool on the path to normalcy. Data aggregation and sharing are the lubricants that make those tools work.

In our Innovation, Data, and the Cautionary Tale of Henrietta Lacks, we looked at some of the legal, ethical, and economic prerequisites for data sharing. Here, we draw on our work on smart cities to examine the opportunities and risks that data aggregation and sharing present to business and society in general.