I Always Feel Like, Somebody's Watching Me...

As we already know, the technology to handle the “Big Data” is already here, or at least – it’s getting there.  The business potential is HUGE.  Today, we are going to play “devils advocate”, and talk about the “other, darker” side to big data. A side that is very easily overlooked, in the Big Data craze, which is sweeping the Internet and IT industry.

When we go online, we start leaving behind data, and this is where the Big Data technology comes in.  As we read our e-mails, surf our social networks, read articles, blog, share photos, shop online, and basically – click away our day, we are like Henzel and Gretel, “leaving behind breadcrumbs of information” – as Gary Kovacs – CEO of Mozilla Corporation stated in a Ted Talk that was published earlier this week.  Mr. Kovacs talked about the vast amount of information, which is being collected about each one of us. With every click of the mouse, more websites begin to follow us, only a small fraction of them being websites we actually visit, and the number of the websites following us grow exponentially as our day wears on and we expand our internet based activities.

Let’s compare this to a “real” world situation.  In most countries, lawyer solicitation is illegal.  If one were to get injured in a car accident, and the day after being released from the hospital, a lawyer would call him offering him legal representation, normally our response would be: “how did he get my number, did the hospital give it to him?”   In the real world we do not fail to see the extreme invasion of privacy and the in-adherence to a certain moral code – and in the real world, in most countries, such a lawyer would actually get disbarred for taking such action.

Now let us conduct a small experiment – go into your Gmail account, and draft an email to yourself.  Title the e-mail “car accident”, and in the body of the mail type in the sentence “I was involved in a car accident”. Now this varies from one user to another, but we are willing to bet that when reading the self-sent mail, you will see on the right hand side of your screen, ads promoting different aspects of the automotive industry, in our case, we got mostly ads for car repair services.   6-7 years ago we all thought this was pretty cool, well it doesn’t seem so cool now…  And again we would like to ask, why is this behavior, which is so intolerable in the “real” world, so accepted in the virtual space?

But surfing habit tracking is only a small part of it.  As businesses utilize Big Data tools more and more to analyze market behavior, and aid their human counterparts in making pricing decisions, more ethical issues are addressed.  Derrick Harris gives the example of landlords utilizing Big Data analysis in order to analyze rental market behavior and maximize rental prices and profit, while totally disregarding the human side of the equation.

Now don’t get us wrong, we love Big Data! We think its business and social implications are huge, and as we mentioned in the beginning of this post, we are only playing “devils advocate”, giving you something to think about over the weekend.

See you next week…