![]() To some degree, this is happening because web users and web developers may not share a universal sense of what is and what is not private. "Now, the expectation of privacy that we've had before Big Data, and our parents had, has been pulled away." "If you cut school, everyone knew it by dinner. "When I grew up in Greensborough, Alabama, the population was 1,200," said Jim Adler, chief privacy officer and general manager of data systems at the information commerce firm Intelius. "People seek privacy so that they can make themselves vulnerable in order to gain something: personal support, knowledge, friendship," she said at the Expectations of privacy are being renegotiated. Privacy is not about control over personal data, according to the web theorist Danah Boyd, but the control individuals think they have. "They have no idea that it will be sold to third parties." So users continue to populate databases such as Social Calendar with increasingly valuable personal information that, as commercial property, can be transferred to a new company with a different privacy ethos. "People give out their data often without thinking about it," said the European commission vice-president Viviane Reding. And last month, police in New York used a photo from Facebook in combination with their own photo files and facial recognition software to arrest a man for attempted murder. In an infamous case in 2006, anonymised search terms released into the public domain by AOL were quickly de-anonymised, identifying individual searchers. "Though one has to be very careful to verify quality and balance it with human expertise and intuition." The girl, who had not registered her pregnancy with the chain, had been identified by a system that looked for pregnancy patterns in her purchase behaviour. In one recent high-profile example, a Minneapolis man discovered his teenage daughter was pregnant because coupons for baby food and clothing were arriving at his address from the US superstore Target. Yet their conclusions can trip into areas that require human sensibilities to truly understand their implications. Big Data proponents view this as an opportunity to observe behaviours in real time, draw real-time conclusions and affect real-time change. The systems used to parse, synthesise, assimilate and make sense of the information are starting to make sophisticated connections and learn patterns. The analysed intelligence is then sold to governments, which can act accordingly. For example, Pax, an experimental system developed by the documentary maker and historian Brian Lapping, predicts the conditions for uprisings using aggregated search terms in different regions of the world. In a trend that is remarkably similar to the plotline of Philip K Dick's Minority Report, Big Data is being used to predict social unrest or criminal intent. "Given enough data, intelligence and power, corporations and government can connect dots in ways that only previously existed in science fiction," said Alexander Howard, government 2.0 correspondent at the technology publisher O'Reilly Media. Google's recent privacy policy change has integrated the various accounts an individual maintains, creating a single profile that includes intentions from its search engine and the connections identified from its social network Google+ preferences and interests from mail, documents or YouTube and location from its maps and mobile phone operating system.Īggregated, this data can prove powerful. Its holdings include more than 800m records about who's in a user's social circle, relationship information, likes, dislikes, public and private messages and even physiological characteristics. Facebook's projected $100bn value is based on the data it offers people who want to exploit its social graph. The most important thing for data holders in the Big Data age is the kind of information they have access to. From the status updates, friendship connections and preferences generated by Facebook and Twitter to search strings on Google, locations on mobile phones and purchasing history on store cards, this is data that's too big to compute easily, yet is so rich that it is being used by institutions in the public and private sectors to identify what people want before they are even aware they want it. The second decade of the 21st century is epitomised by Big Data. ![]()
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