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The Ethics Of Big Data And An Individual 's Privacy

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The Ethics of Big Data and an Individual’s Privacy 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. Libraries would be considered the first cataloging of human information, but as software and hardware continued to grow in the ability to collect and store data information is now happening at an astronomical rate. To get a glimpse, or bigger picture, of Big Data here are a few facts of how much data is being generated and managed (Villanova University): 1) Per IBM, users create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. In practical terms, this means that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. 2) Walmart controls more than 1 million customers transitions every hour, which are then transferred into a database working with over 2.5 petabytes of information. 3) Per FICO, the credit card fraud system helps to protect over two billion accounts all over the globe. 4) Facebook holds more than 45 billion photos in its user database, a number that is growing daily 5)

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