Monday, April 23, 2012

The online product, you.

Exploiting Big Data's opportunities will need a delicate balance between the right to knowledge and the right of the individual
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/22/big-data-privacy-information-currency
  • This month, the US chain Walmart bought the startup Social Calendar, one of the most popular calendar apps on Facebook..when a Social Calendar user listed a friend's birthday or details of a holiday to Malaga, she or he probably had no idea the information would end up in the hands of a US supermarket. But now it will be cross-referenced with Walmart's own data, plus any other databases that are available, to generate a compelling profile of individual Social Calendar users and their non-Social Calendar-using friends
  • 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. 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. 
  • 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 murde
  • Sceptics like Adler argue that the right to be forgotten is flawed because it ignores how social boundaries are currently being negotiated in the Big Data world. "The ability to delete personal information means that you lose the potential for lessons learned," he said. "If you can step away and erase something someone says that is stupid or hurtful, you lose an element of accountability."
  • The weakest link is the technology itself. The Target pregnancy case demonstrates that machines can pick up patterns in ways that may have unexpected consequences for individuals.

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