Friday, February 27, 2015

Is it the Issue of Privacy or the Issue of Power?

I discussed with various people about the potential benefits and risks of big data. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term big data, a formal definition from Google is given: extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions. With the recent events concerning privacy issues, I thought my perspective would be unpopular. However, when I asked people about these ideas, I was pretty surprised.

Most people I talked to felt that we could benefit a lot from big data. When talking about it, often the example of pulling data from people's Facebook profiles came up. Most said they were fine if someone were to use their info from Facebook in order to promote research. One even said they liked how their ads were personalized to them so that if they were going to get pestered by ads anyways, at least they might be relevant to them. Another common view was that what you did on the web was your responsibility, and if someone used your web activity as a tool for measuring human behavior, there would be no fault to the analyst.

So all in all, the dogma of our behavior being exposed as a whole wasn't as big of an issue as I thought it was. Most of the issues had to do with power as well as the integrity of mankind today. The question became who is looking at this data? Do the opportunities really outweigh the risks?

Many of the people who had these concerns were the same people who worry that our national security or even that our government has too much power. However data is evolving in a different way than people are, Times are changing, and we are living in a world where more and more data is being produced. Once data is out there, it can never be erased. The answer isn't necessarily to not let people use the data, but rather to control it. If it better regulated and not loosely managed, we can be more assured that the chances of our private information going into the wrong hands will be greatly reduced.

2 comments:

  1. I agree that it's not a big deal for me if companies want to analyze my behavior online. I recognize when they're targeting ads to me almost immediately. I Google info about a flight to Costa Rica and suddenly I login to Facebook and I'm bombarded with ads about flights to central america, but it makes me laugh. They think they're clever but it doesn't have much of an effect on me. But that's just me.

    I thought it was interesting you mentioned the answer is to control the data. What would be the best way to do this? It's going to be especially interesting now with the new laws passed by the FCC, seeing as the internet is going to be defined as a public utility. I'm curious if these new regulations will help to control big data.

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  2. I think that it is very convenient that social media has access to information about us so that it brings up ads and information relevant to us. Personally I think it ties back to the search for order theme. We are able to collect and categorize things that are relevant to us.

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