Big Data And Digital Privacy Policy Concerns

Big data analytics can be used by company to make informed business decision by examining large amount of varied data to get customer preferences, market trends and other useful information. Company can use it to explore new revenue opportunities, improved operational efficiency, better customer service and competitive advantages over rivals.

One of the biggest concerns in the United States of America today is privacy. For its citizens, this concern is due mostly in part to new developments in technology and big data collection. Yes, this technology and data collection is beneficial for American citizens and is a step in the right direction for humankind, but to what extent? The CQ Researcher article titled, “Big Data and Privacy” by Tom Price answers just that question. More specifically, a monumental factor for technological advancement this article explains is the use of personal information by the producers of new technology and the collection of big data in this day in age. What makes this debate on the violation of privacy through the use personal information by businesses, as well as, the general population, is that big data collection is the staple of technological advancement and serves as a convenience for Americans. Although big data collection and technology serves as an extreme benefit in relation to convenience and societal advancement for those who use and consume it, how far will scientists, researchers, businesses, and the government push before it becomes a violation our privacy as citizens of the United States of America?

There are several positive uses of big data including the development of more accurate weather prediction systems, research and production of self-driving vehicles, making cities smarter, and collecting more data during exercise in order to train in the most efficient way. The essential item in keeping this straight is striving to develop policies that reflect our ideals and then implementing it. This falls on the shoulders of the government. Minimizing the gap between the implementation and policy can be achieved through various venues. Transparency is of paramount importance when dealing with surveillance and entrusting other entities with personal information. If any person is being spied on or having information collected, they should know about it and of course it should be legal. Google as a service is a good example. Although using Google’s services are “free” to use, it sells our personal information to other companies for surveillance capitalism and marketing. Google should have an agreement or make it clearly known that this is what is happening and then provide an option to pay for its services directly and not disclose user’s information. Additionally, companies that participate in such behaviors should be legally bound with well-defined terms and be regularly

Technology companies are using big data to analyze millions of voice samples to deliver more reliable and accurate voice interfaces. Banks are using big data techniques to im- prove fraud detection. Health care providers are leveraging more detailed data to im- prove patient treatment. Big data is being used by manufacturers to improve warranty management and equipment monitoring, as well as to optimize the logistics of getting their products to market. Retailers are harnessing a wide range of customer interactions, both online and offline, in order to provide more tailored recommendations and optimal pricing.96

Big Data is the act of compiling large sets of data based on a single individual or groups. Everyone encounters data in their daily life--you are experiencing it when you log onto a social media account, when you stream entertainment online, or even when you are online shopping. When you do any of these things you are leaving behind a digital trace that can be accessed by just about anyone. In “Six Provocations for Big Data,” danah boyd and Kate Crawford raise questions regarding the nature of Big Data. What is considered public information? What is the ethical way to go about retrieving data from online sources? Is Big Data more harmful or helpful? How often do you encounter Big Data, or data in general? What is the relationship between data

Data is a forever growing thing and is not looking to slow down anytime soon. With that be said, companies must be able to manage data for their day to day operations as well as for predicting future trend. Now there are many tools for managing data and extremely high cost for managing it as well. One of the costs for managing data is data security, but this paper will touch on that topic in, but not as much as other topics. Also, this paper will demonstrate various business cases to serve as testimonial for just how useful big data management it in to day society.

What is Big Data? Big Data is the mass collection of user data by mathematical algorithms, databases, data mining, and the use of datasets that were once believed to be static and unusable. Big Data’s history goes way back “…70 years to the first attempts to quantify the growth rate in the volume of data, or what has popularly been known as the “information explosion” (Press, Gil).” Researchers had predicted the massive growth of information and how our ability to collect and store it would need to continue to grow as well.

In today’s society, there is a growing amount of people whose data is being collected through different mediums within their everyday lives. This information is also known as big data; great amounts of data collected through various forms into large data systems. Ed Dumbill (2012) claims the input data is collected through systems such as “chatter from social networks, web server logs, traffic flow sensors, satellite imagery, broadcast audio streams, banking transactions, MP3s of rock music, the content of web pages, scans of government documents, GPS trails, telemetry from automobiles, financial market data, the list goes on”. The data is then stored within large data systems that are both restricted and highly accessible to certain individuals and groups. Many companies, who have increasing accessibility to big data, have been using this information to understand the wants and needs of their target group for the sole purpose of monetary or political profit. Big data analytics can reveal insights hidden previously by data too costly to process, such as peer influence among customers, revealed by analyzing shoppers’ transactions, social and geographical data (SOURCE – online article ed dumbill). As a result, people’s information or data has become assets to companies, being regarded as property to be bought and sold to between companies. However, this has put forward the following primary ethical dilemmas surrounding human rights: the right to informed consent and the

The most important and significant challenge in the big data is to preserve privacy information of the customers, employees, and the organizations. It is very sensitive and includes conceptual, technical as well as legal significance. Any collected information about a person, when combined with other sets of data, can lead to the finding of persons secret and private information. “ As big data expands the sources of data it can use, the trustworthiness of each data source needs to be verified, and techniques should be explored to identify maliciously inserted data” (Jaseena K.U. Julie M. David). Big data gives us a significant opportunity in the field of national security, a breakthrough of diseases, medical researchers, marketing and business analysis, urban planning, and so on. But these exceptional advantages of big data are also restricted by the privacy concerns and the data protection. On the other side, privacy is a huge concern. Critical pieces of information of users are collected and used in furtherance to add value for any businesses. This is done by exploiting the insight in their personal information, and in most of the cases, users are totally unaware of it. The user might not want to share his/ her information. But, it is already being known to the data owner without the consent or even knowledge of it to the user. “ Unauthorized release of information, unauthorized modification of information and denial of resources are the three categories of security

With the growth of technology, there is a substantial growth of data by volume, variety and velocity satisfying the criteria of Big Data . Volume of data already exceeded 100 EB at the end of 1990s, reached 1.8 ZB at 2011, and we have already entered in the age of ZB. By 2020, it was forecasted that the volume of data will be 50 times bigger than the one at 2011 . Big data is used to describe the huge data sets (terabyte to Exabyte) and Big Data analytics are the techniques applied on them.

The industry is inundated with articles on big data. Big data news is no longer confined to the technical web pages. You can read about big data in the mainstream business publications such as Forbes and The Economist. Each week the media reports on breakthroughs, startups, funding and customer use cases. No matter your source for information on big data, one thing they all have in common is that the amount of information an organization will manage is only going to increase; this is what’s driving the ‘big data’ movement.

Over the past few years, the volume of data collected and stored by business and government organizations has exploded. This data are refer to as “big data”, as it is an evolving term that describes any voluminous amount of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information. The big data is a by-product of everyday human activities on the web, the record of multiple dimensions of social life: the tracks of our purchases on automated payment system, the record logs of our queries for finding information on search engines; the record of social networking services of our connections to friends, colleagues and collaborators; the record traces of our movements on wireless networks and mobile devices. The societal benefits of big data include; breakthroughs in medicine, data security, and energy use, conversely it contains personal sensitive information, so that the opportunities of discovering knowledge increase with the risks of privacy violation. (Monreale et. al., 2014; Tene and Polonetsky, 2013).

Now that we have figured out how to harvest the free and ubiquitous big data, the next huge challenge is to figure out how to analyze and display the information in a useful and meaningful way. The big question today is how you present big data in a way that human beings can quickly understand and make decision. Most big corporations and government entities are drowning in a pool of their own data, because they lack the corresponding manpower to understand the data and extract meaningful knowledge out of it (Bizer, Boncz, Brodie, & Erling, 2012).

Big data is often referred to and defined in many different ways.In layman terms, we can interpret it as massive or huge amounts of information which cannot be handled efficiently by the current technologies and softwares. But recent technological advancements like data analytics, and social or media networks allow process, transfer, allocate, measure and represent enormous amounts of data which can also be referred to as Big Data.

Big data is an extensive collection of structured and unstructured data. It is a modern day technology which is applied to store, manage and analyze data that are not possible to manage, store and analyze by using the commonly used software or tools. Since all of our daily tasks are overtaken by the modern technologies and all the businesses and organizations are using internet system to operate, the production of data has increased significantly in past