Imagine someone told you that every bit of personal information you have exchanged with an individual or company through any digital interface such as the internet, cell phone, GPS devices, and electronic payment systems has been piled upon millions of other people’s personal information in datasets that are unfathomably large and incomprehensible to any human mind. Would you believe it? What if the same individual continued to tell you that these data sets are “mined” using complex algorithms to discover subtle patterns, correlations, and relationships among citizens? That may sound pretty far-fetched. You may be astonished to learn just how real this data collection is, and the extent to which the compiled information is being used for business tactics in all parts of the world.
“Big Data” is the unofficial term used to describe predictive analytics: the collecting, storing, and analyzing large volumes of data. The name Big Data began in the recent years due to the constantly growing abundance of data and the ability to mine the data much more efficiently using computer algorithms. This modern version of predictive analytics has resulted in the creation of the data analysis industry; an industry that is worth billions of dollars each year and continues to grow despite the ethical issues beginning to plague the technological practice.
Ethical dilemmas emerged with the realization that such data collections pose a threat of personal information becoming disclosed for more damaging but subtle effects on economies and individuals, such as misuse of data for personal agendas and creation of erroneous information. Despite its complexity, data mining is a technology that is very agile and can be recruited for a variety of tasks, be...
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The personal connection Americans have with their phones, tablets, and computers; and the rising popularity of online shopping and social websites due to the massive influence the social media has on Americans, it is clear why this generation is called the Information Age, also known as Digital Age. With the Internet being a huge part of our lives, more and more personal data is being made available, because of our ever-increasing dependence and use of the Internet on our phones, tablets, and computers. Some corporations such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook; governments, and other third parties have been tracking our internet use and acquiring data in order to provide personalized services and advertisements for consumers. Many American such as Nicholas Carr who wrote the article “Tracking Is an Assault on Liberty, With Real Dangers,” Anil Dagar who wrote the article “Internet, Economy and Privacy,” and Grace Nasri who wrote the article “Why Consumers are Increasingly Willing to Trade Data for Personalization,” believe that the continuing loss of personal privacy may lead us as a society to devalue the concept of privacy and see privacy as outdated and unimportant. Privacy is dead and corporations, governments, and third parties murdered it for their personal gain not for the interest of the public as they claim. There are more disadvantages than advantages on letting corporations, governments, and third parties track and acquire data to personalized services and advertisements for us.
To begin with, various websites are violating our privacy by selling our data to third party companies. Today accumulation of personal information is escalating using technology tools all over the world without permission of an individual. Precisely, social networking sites such as Facebook collects information actively while websites such as Google passively. Facebook allows strangers to view anyone’s profile and systematically eliminates privacy for those who choos...
Big Data is a term used to refer to extremely large and complex data sets that have grown beyond the ability to manage and analyse them with traditional data processing tools. However, Big Data contains a lot of valuable information which if extracted successfully, it will help a lot for business, scientific research, to predict the upcoming epidemic and even determining traffic conditions in real time. Therefore, these data must be collected, organized, storage, search, sharing in a different way than usual. In this article, invite you and learn about Big Data, methods people use to exploit it and how it helps our life.
In a world of Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and OKCupid and Google and IPhones and Ipads and Kindles and all the other hundreds of sites and devices designed to garner personal information, data-mine your information, to better advertise, sell, inform, and connect you with the people or the places that you want to experience. The wonderful world of the Internet helps connect millions of people with millions of other people in milliseconds all day, every day. All the swapping and sharing of information create a world of transparency, deception, fraud, and identity confusion. Avatars, aliases, and profiles are the ways most people advertise their goods and services and themselves. With this consideration an erosion of privacy has changed our culture in ways that some predicted years ago and some that are new to our era. This paper will explore some primary regarding how technology causes the changes in privacy and what are the effects brought on by these changes.
Big Data has gained massive importance in IT and Business today. A report recently published state that use of big data by a retailer could increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent and it also states that US health care sector could make more than $300 billion profit with the use of big data. There are many other sectors that could profit largely by proper analysis and usage of big data.
The creativity and ingenious of human beings has enabled the development of technologies that have overall, benefited all of mankind. Arguably one of the most if not the most pivotal man made technological achievement is that of the internet. The internet has allowed for the seeming less transfer of data and information in a matter of seconds. With this innovation has come an increase in communication, enhancement of understanding other cultures, and a mass gathering of data. The amount of data now in existence due to the internet has created the need for big data. Big data has developed as a solution to the traditional computer infrastructure that has become obsolete due to its inability to handle the massive amounts of data now in existence. The benefits of big data are ever expanding and attractive as it can improve the efficiency of companies, research, health sciences yet, the consequences of using big data are just as intensifying and are causing some backlash in many communities. The current issues surrounding big data and the increasingly dependent nature of the world’s people on big data will undoubtedly impact the use of big data in the future.
Big Data has become very popular now-a-days, because of the unlimited data coming from various sources and is difficult to handle by data base management systems. As the information that is gathered from different sources is very large and complex, it has become complex and not easy to process all the information through traditional way of data processing. And here it comes big data into a picture. It’s one of the most popular technologies which have its applications in almost every field. This paper explores the value of real time big data in education, and health care. “Big Data is when your data becomes so large that you have to start innovating how to collect, store, organize, analyze and share it”. (Gobble, MaryAnne M., 2013)
Attracting focus from firms in all industries, Big Data offers many benefits to those companies with the ability to harness its full potential. Firms using small data derive all of the data’s worth from its primary use, the purpose for which the data was initially collected. With Big Data, “data’s value shifts from its primary use towards its potential future uses” (Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013, p.99) thus leading to considerable increases in business efficiency. Employing Big Data analytics allows firms to increase their innovative capacity, and realize substantial cost reductions and time reductions. Moreover, Big Data techniques can be applied to support internal business decisions by identifying complex relationships within data. However, it is also important to recognize that much of Big Data’s value is “largely predicated on the public’s continued willingness to give data about themselves freely” (Brough, n.d., para. 11). As previously discussed, much of the content of Big Data is unstructured data from social media sites etc., and so if such data were to no longer be publically available due to regulation etc. the value of Big Data would be significantly diminished.
Big Data is a term used to describe the large volume of data whether structured or unstructured that inundates a given operation on a daily basis (http://www.SAS.com). Big Data consists of data sets that are so huge and complex that the customary data processing applications would not adequately handle them. Of late, the concept of Big Data has been used to describe the use of predictive analysis, user behaviour analytics and other complex data analytics techniques for the extraction value from data. The concept of Big Data can be understood through the description of the three V’s as advanced by Doug Laney, who is an industry analyst. First, Big Data can be understood in terms of Volume, whereby organizations collect large data from a variety
The world erupted in outrage following revelations by Edward Snowden regarding the extent of surveillance perform by the National Security Agency. Privacy becomes one of the hottest topic of 2013 and was chosen by the world’s most popular online dictionary, Dictionary.com, as the Word of the Year. However, the government is not the only one that conduct data gathering and surveillance. Employers often monitor their employees, and businesses collect data on theirs customer. The morality of these practices is a topic that generates heated debate.
The key strategy implementation efforts at Amazon all surround the use of “big data”. Big data is the growth and availability of large volumes of structured/unstructured data. The use of big data has allowed decision making based upon data and analysis instead of past experience and intuition. Big data has directed organizational change in allowing Amazon to expand from an online book store to an internet giant. Revolutionary application of big data has allowed Amazon to create superior service quality while motivating employees by providing real time information to solve customer issues. Big data has strengthened Amazon’s competitive capabilities by pioneering the application of big data and charging a monthly fee to smaller businesses
Davenport, Thomas H., Paul Barth, and Randy Bean. "How Big Data Is Different." MIT Sloan Management Review. N.p., 30 July 2012. Web. 18 Mar. 2014. .
There are various kinds of definitions about what data mining is. The authors in [1] define data mining as “the process of extracting previously unknown information from (usually large quantities of) data, which can, in the right context, lead to knowledge”. Data mining is widely used in areas such as business analysis, bioinformatics analysis, medical analysis, etc. Data mining techniques bring us a lot of benefits. Business companies can use data mining tools to search potential customers and increase their profits; medical diagnosis can use data mining to predict potential disease. Although the term “data mining” itself is neutral and has no ethical implications, it is often related to the analysis of information associated with individuals. “The ethical dilemmas arise when data mining is executed over the data of an individual” [2]. For example, using a user’s data to do data mining and classifying the user into some group may result in a variety of ethical issues. In this paper, we deal with two kinds of ethical issues caused by data mining techniques: informational privacy issues in web-data mining and database security issues in data mining. We also look at these ethical issues in a societal level and a global level.
In terms of government intelligence, in the information age greatest threats to privacy have been the result of technology and business practices related to e-commerce, marketing and information databases, and not the result of government intrusions (Hoffman, Novak & Peralta, 1997). Nevertheless “all things considered, the increasing and overlapping information sharing by governments and businesses about formerly confidential or private activities generates concerns about potential violations of individual’s privacy rights” (Mace, 2008 cited in Gal, Kantor & Lesk, 2008, p.41).