Its a legitimate subject.
This Wired author points out that the brave new world of big data and the analytical ability to process it provides all sorts of possibilities - some good, some bad. But you can't have one without the other:
If you think about all the hype generated about consumer privacy and enterprises collating and analyzing information for a more targeted and personal experience, customer segmentation and demographics, location-based and real-time marketing what the NSA exposure has taught us is that there really is no privacy in the 21st century and we should just get used to it. Our data is anonymized unless it’s being used specifically for our purpose and benefit but the fact is we are happily generating it for them to use in any case.
But Big Data is no longer creepy. Sorry but it’s not. You must live in painful ignorance if you think that every nuance of a digital interaction hasn’t been collected by someone and analyzed. What’s clear is that analytics and big data seem to be labelled as only for marketers to hound us with or for banks to sell us more debt laden products. We forget, for example, about the medical and scientific boundaries being broken that rely on data analytics and human generated information to help it along.
At some point there will be consumer based tools affordable enough for people to make sense of the data they generate themselves, and why not, it’s all part of the equation. Personal graph analysis will become a reality as much as its parent will be wielded by enterprises.
So, you see, we have heroes and villains even in data analytics but it’s all a matter of perspective. The NSA are deemed evil for breaching our liberties and analyzing data without our consent to understand terrorist activities, and medical science is a force of good for helping us cure diseases using data sourced from all manner of places.
