A couple of decades ago it would have been considered outrageous to have our personal information shared with the world. But not anymore. We post our favorite photos and other proceedings of daily events for the world to see on social media. Not just personal information voluntarily given, more than ever, businesses and governments are collecting all sorts of data for various purposes.
Consider these trends which compliment each other in making big data analytics attractive and viable:
- Advances in technologies and the increasing amount of information are transforming how business is conducted in many industries and governments. Some businesses rely heavily on advertising revenue for which data provides an important means of driving their business. The global advertising spending is projected to exceed $500 billion in 2019. Some others try to add value to their main line of business by understanding more about their customers. And even if businesses see no immediate value, they are collecting data anyway and saving them in huge data lakes, hoping that they could find some use for it later on. Various government agencies operate some of the world’s most advanced surveillance networks
- The volume of data collection is growing at an explosive rate and it may be difficult to comprehend the numbers. For instance, predictions put the number of IoT devices to reach a staggering 30 billion by 2020. By 2025, it is estimated that several hundred exabytes of data will be created each day globally
- Dramatic reduction in cost of storage has a big role to play. In the 1980s, storing a GB worth of data might have pinched your pocket by a few hundred thousand dollars, but now cost per GB is down to about $0.03. The economics of scale that many cloud providers leverage on reduces this even further. For instance, in AWS, the cost per GB of storage on the standard S3 is running around $0.02 as of June 2019. Fundamental changes in storage technologies might dramatically reduce this even further (e.g. via nano technology by using DNA for storage)
No matter how businesses and governments use the data, what is really important is transparency and awareness. If Google maps tracks my location while I am using it for navigation, it seems like an acceptable tradeoff. If Google saves this information to improve its navigation service it is seems completely reasonable. However if Angry Birds sells my personal information to third parties (which is actually in line with their privacy statement) and if one of those third parties send my personal information with little or no encryption to others without my consent, that would definitely concern me. With Edward Snowden’s revelations we have seen how useful even the so called meta data could be in data analysis
There is just too much data at stake to ignore its ramifications. The first step in fixing any problem is to identify and understand it. Is there a problem here? Are we truly aware of what information is being collected and how it is used? In this context here is a book that could help us get started with the discussion – In his book “Data and Goliath: The hidden battles to capture your data and control your world”, Bruce Schneier outlines what we could do to protect ourselves from government and corporate surveillance, and suggests policy recommendations that balance legitimate surveillance needs with legitimate privacy rights.
Let us all beware. Perhaps those privacy notices we completely tend to ignore deserve a little more attention.