77 Quotes by Hannah Fry

In every community, there are a number of 'social super-spreaders' among us. Long-suspected and emphatically confirmed by our data, these are people who - through dint of their job, or lifestyle, or perhaps even genetic makeup - would be more dangerous in the instance of a pandemic than the average person.

A century ago the Spanish flu confounded scientists and devastated whole regions, but while today's society has air travel and an enormous, heterogeneous population, we also have antibiotics, fantastic communication networks and, perhaps most crucially, more data than ever.

History is littered with examples of objects and inventions with a power beyond their professed purpose. Sometimes it's deliberately and maliciously factored into their design, but at other times, it's a result of thoughtless omissions.

The invisible pieces of code that form the gears and cogs of the modern machine age, algorithms have given the world everything from social media feeds to search engines and satellite navigation to music recommendation systems.

As the law catches up and the battle between corporate profits and social good plays out, we need to be careful not to be lulled into a false sense of privacy.