October 11, 2012–NPR recently published a piece explaining in layman’s terms the reason why big data posses such a threat to our society in the article, “Big Data and Its Big Problems.”
According to the article, while big data may mean different things to different people, at the heart of the issue it comes down to attacking big problems. As computers have advanced, they have grown much faster and their data storage abilities have improved greatly. This allows us to also see smaller and more important details in the process.
While it is easy to see what this means to us as individuals, you have to also look at its impact in a societal context. We scatter digital breadcrumbs constantly through credit card purchases, cell phone calls, and internet searches. But we rarely think about the impact of harnessing that data.
As Alex Pentland of MIT puts it:
“What those breadcrumbs tell is the story of your life. It tells what you’ve chosen to do. That’s very different than what you put on Facebook. What you put on Facebook is what you would like to tell people, edited according to the standards of the day. Who you actually are is determined by where you spend time, and which things you buy. Big data is increasingly about real behavior, and by analyzing this sort of data, scientists can tell an enormous amount about you. They can tell whether you are the sort of person who will pay back loans. They can tell you if you’re likely to get diabetes.”
Whether we like it or not, big data is being utilized by companies on a daily basis in order to predict our every move. For those looking to harness big data to understand and predict the buying decisions of your customers, detect fraud, or uncover market trends, consider Digital Reasoning. For over a decade, Digital Reasoning has deployed its flagship product Synthesys in a number of critical intelligence communities to deliver automated understanding for big data.
Jasmine Ashton
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
