Published by Patrick on 18 May 2012
Big Data, Privacy and Global Expectations
Recently over at The Guardian, technology writer Aleks Krotoski pondered some of the many implications of Big Data — the newest Topic of Import in tech editorial circles.” Big data,” as you may know, is the cuddly-sounding euphemism for the Matrix-sized quantity of personalized information, you, I and every other web-connected human being on earth are depositing into that vast database in the cloud every time we go online and with every move, click, and search we make while there. This is a lot of data we’re talking about — it includes our browsing habits, our likes, our interests, our friends, our photos, our tweets, our purchase history, our personal location data and cellphone GPS signals, our healthcare data, tax filings and ever so much more. It’s estimated that every day the online world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data that exists on servers and hard drives today has been created in the last two years alone.
The fact that personal data is a commodity is not a new idea to most of us; Facebook’s current pre-IPO market valuation of $100 billion is based entirely upon the value of the ever-expanding trove of information — the “social graph” — it holds about its 900 million users, information that is of incredible value to potential advertisers. But Facebook and browser cookies are just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. There are half a million apps in the iTunes store alone. All of them collect and store some data on their users, and often on their users’ friends. What’s more, if any of those apps were to be acquired by another commercial entity, it would own all that data, and could put it to any use it liked.
There’s also more than mere advertiser interest at stake. Krotoski rightly notes that much of the bounty offered by Big Data could be quite useful to governments: the ability to predict large-scale outbreaks of disease before anyone has even checked into the hospital, for example, or, more darkly, the ability to predict political uprisings. At the individual level, the predictive capacity of big data on you and me is even scarier. Remember the personalized advertising environment of Minority Report? That just scratches the surface of what companies could do with unlimited social graphs of data on your every interest, action, and utterance. All of them could be used to define and predict what else you will like, do and say. Helpful? Possibly. Totalitarian? Definitely. As Neil Postman famously suggested, it’s not Orwell’s 1984 we need to worry about. It’s Huxley’s Brave New World. The most frightening walled-off, total-surveillance regime in the world isn’t North Korea. It’s Facebook.

