by Angela Guess
A new article discusses how Big Data is pushing us toward a surveillance society, noting that Big Data “will change our existing notions of privacy. A surveillance society is not only inevitable, it’s worse. It’s irresistible.” The article explains, “For businesses, knowing where people are by using geo-locational data will help them personalize advertising and marketing materials over the Web. For example, if a company knows a customer is in Aruba, it won’t bother offering him or her advertising for restaurants in New York, but instead it may market sun-tanning lotion or scuba-diving excursions.”
The article continues, “Knowing where people are will also determine with accuracy which potential customer is which. For example, if there are five people living in the U.S. with the same name and the same date of birth, but live in different cities, knowing their locations at a given time verifies their identities.”
The article goes on to discuss the types of data that businesses are using: “Big data, an industry term that refers to large data warehouses, includes machine- and human-generated data such as computer system log files, financial services electronic transactions, Web search streams, e-mail meta data, search engine queries and social networking activity. In 2010 alone, 1.5 zetabytes of this data was created, most of which was machine-generated. Corporations filled their data center storage systems with about 16 exabytes of that data last year, according to Jason Hoffman, founder and chief scientist at cloud software provider Joyent.”
photo credit: Daquella manera
