With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility

In the world we live in today - of technology that seems to advance at the drop of a hat, of incredible gadgets and gismos, of electronic everything - one matter that has thus come to the forefront of technological advancement is big data and data protection. McKinsey and Company's article "Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity" takes on this matter of big data, pointing out the positive innovation and changes as well as the value that the use of big data presents, especially in regard to businesses. A study on big data conducted by the MGI (McKinsey Global Institute) was largely referenced in this article, as it provides the various reasons how companies in particular can and are benefitting significantly from the use of big data. According to this study, a few of the ways that businesses could benefit from using big data include (but are not limited to): it will allow companies to better keep track of transactional data digitally, give companies better access to data, become the basis of competition and growth for companies, create more job opportunities for people searching for work, etc. SAS has an entire page of their website dedicated to big data. On the page, big data is defined as "a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured". Major aspects of big data are discussed as well, such as the dramatic increase in big data over the years due to the Internet, the immense pace at which data is constantly streaming, the wide variety of data available as well as the ever-changing quality of big data, and the complex nature of big data due to the incredible amount of data out there. The page goes on to discuss the root issue of big data which is not the obtainment of the data but rather the use of the data for good. They say that proper use of big data by businesses, for example, could bring about "1) cost reductions, 2) time reductions, 3) new product development and optimized offerings, and 4) smarter business decision making". Big data was also analyzed by an article in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Rise of Big Data: How It's Changing the Way We Think About the World". This article focused on the abundance of big data in the modern world compared to the amount of data available in the early days of the world, which was deemed largely due to the digital storage of data that exists in the world of today. The author also points out how things like friendship via Facebook and location via longitude and latitude are now being stored as data as they never were before. This article also serves to point out the effect that big data has on regular, everyday people of the world, and how one is to "adopt this technology with an appreciation not just of its power but also of its limitations." The New York Time's article "The Age of Big Data" looks further into the concept of big data. The author looked past the effect big data has on businesses and the economy at large, and extended that effect to political sciences among other sciences as well as sports and even social media. The article also makes note of how big data gives way to more machines: more machines analyzing the data, more machines to help people access the data, etc. On the other hand, the article also delves into the drawbacks of big data, such as that it can lead to many misunderstandings, more opportunities to manipulate people into misinterpreting data as a result of biases, and so on. In another article on big data from The Atlantic entitled "They're Watching You at Work" discusses what big data looks like through the eyes of the average job-seeker, and how it is going to impact how companies "hire, fire, and promote." The author says that big data leads not only to more jobs as statisticians and statistical analysts, but also that it leads to more "people analysts" who essentially would keep track of all data necessary to understand a person and their entire life, data that would be the basis of hiring, firing, promoting, etc. "What big data can tell us about the relationships between world leaders", an article featured in The Washington Post, gave a report on a study conducted by the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT). This study looked at international relations by means of how frequently world leaders are mentioned in articles. GDELT created word clouds in order to "show the top 100 names mentioned in articles about a specific world leader, and how often these names occurred." Finally, an article from The New Yorker entitled "Bright Lights, Big Data" the author tells from his own point of view in the form of an anecdote concerning the what he learned in regard to big data and digital humanities by reading the book Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture by scientists Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. One such learning he gained was the many ways big data can be tied to other subjects, such as linguistics. He also made note of his appreciation for the book's discussion of how big data "is going to change the humanities, transform the social sciences, and renegotiate the relationship between the world of commerce and the ivory tower." The common theme that appears in this wide range of articles is that big data, depending on its usage, can either help or it can hurt. Some focused on the many positive influences it has on things like business, understandings of relationships, and so on. Others pointed out the ill effects of big data, such as that it can lead to misinformation. Taking into account what big data is and what it does, how significant will - in the words of Derrick Harris of Gigaom website - "Platfora, the startup that sells an analytics and visualization application designed to run on Hadoop" be? Is it a game changer? How does it compare to other business intelligence products like it? After looking at the facts, it is can be made clear that this will most likely be a game changer in the world of big data. One reason is that similar business intelligence products cannot compare as a result of its close connection with Hadoop. For example, as Harris said, "Tableau and most other business intelligence products can connect to data stored in Hadoop, Platfora runs on top of Hadoop. That means no time spent loading large datasets into a different product, no time transforming the data and no need to sample the data at all." Therefore, Platfora tops the other business intelligence products in that regard. Also, Platfora further sets itself apart from other products in that it allows businesses to analyze sets of data more efficiently. Already, big name businesses have seen the advantageous nature of Platfora, such as Citi, Disney and Comcast. As discussed in The Atlantic's article "They're Watching You at Work", one major drawback of big data is that it can lead to unnecessary surveillance, and it can bring up the issue of data protection. This issue is made evident in The Guardian's article "Google faces lawsuit over email scanning and student data" in which a lawsuit regarding Google's illegal surveillance of emails and student data is discussed. Google's activities here are an example of taking advantage of big data in order to do harm, by illegally spying on the lives of others. On the other hand, another article from The Guardian entitled "Technology: using power for good" discusses the many ways in which technology and big data can be instead used for the betterment of the lives of all people around the world. For example, it is said in the article that "Technology has huge potential to be used for social good. Mobiles and mapping software can be used to gather data, and visualise patterns and trends; predictive analytics can be used to help translate 'big data' into useful statistics; unmanned aerial vehicles can monitor real-time crises; and social media helps mobilise groups around the world." Thus, even though some use the great power that comes with big data for good, while that does not erase all the benefits of big data.