Business Insider spoke to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance at the University of Oxford and co-author of “Reinventing Capitalism in the age of big data."

Mayer-Schönberger said companies collecting our data could lead to "sinister" dangers, such as flaws in digital recommendation engines.

He added the age of big data could also lead to large monopolies.

Read the full transcript below:

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger: The huge market platforms, the Netflixes and the Amazons of this world, they know a lot about us, and we as humans think that we’re so original and so creative and so unpredictable and irrational. When in fact, we are much more predictable than we think.

So those companies could conceivably use the data that they have and try to influence us, not just inner buying decisions but in our political decisions. We’ve seen some of that sinister tone in the discussion about fake news on Facebook and the targeting of fake news to particular users of Facebook over the last six to nine months.

So the obvious danger for consumers is that they become transparent, that their privacy, their data is being abused or at least exploited by those large platforms. But I see a larger, more sinister danger.

And that sinister danger has to do with the fact that those digital recommendation engines, those smart assistants that are data-driven and are proliferating on those data-rich market platforms, these assistants are fed with data from all of us.

If these assistants have a flaw in how they interpret data, then every one of the recommendations they make will be flawed, will be biased, and so we all make the wrong decisions.

The beauty of the market has always been that it’s been resilient; if someone makes a stupid choice, the market doesn’t go down the tube. But that only works if we’re independent of each other.

If, however, we all listen to the same stupid, smart recommendation engine, we all may make the same mistake. It’s like finding out your car has a brake that doesn’t work, and everybody else’s car has the same brake. This is the kind of single point of failure we may encounter if we continue along the paths of these monopolistic structures

If we believe that the market is a really good social innovation to bring people together and to help them coordinate, then we need to keep them competitive. Every company that operates in the market and is getting larger and larger will be able to offer their products at lower prices. That’s called the scale effect. If you scale up, you can produce more cheaply.

The counterforce to the scale effect of market concentration has always been innovation. That is, that a new company can come in with a great idea and then topple the incumbent because they just have the better idea to use. The problem now is that most innovation in the future is going to be data-driven. It’s going to be derived from feedback data from consumers and users.

So, the companies that have a lot of data will also be highly innovative. That will lead to an unprecedented age of market concentration. And if we don’t stop it now, we will find monopolies that combine political and market power like we have never seen before.

Produced by Fraser Moore. Camera by David Ibekwe.