Big Problems of Big Data

While Big Data can be a boon to a business and government, there are big problems as well. Privacy and security of such vast amounts of data are obvious, but there are others, which I address here. While I am a huge proponent of Big Data and believe it will bring great benefit economically and socially, we still need to be aware of the risks. Here I briefly outline some;

Punishment: The premise of the book then movie Minority Report, where data analytics is used to predict a murder about to happen. Imagine a company using your social media data and other collected data (financial, buying habits etc.) to predict if you’d make a good employee? Or pre-punishment by not awarding a mortgage? We as humans tend to operate in a world of cause and effect. This is not a good approach to implementing Big Data solutions.

Dictatorship by Data: Big Data is inherently messy. It has to be. By relying too much on the data we can let it dictate to us actions we might take. Already we see governments wanting more data before making a decision. Businesses are already striving for the ultimate dashboard, a quick way for the C-Suite to see the answer to make the decision.

The Rulers of the Data: Consider that algorithms are written to analyse the data. This is done by data scientists and the extra-smart ones known as “quants”. They are employed mostly by companies, some by governments. They right the rules. That is a lot of power entrusted to regular folks. The brilliant author and thinker Jaron Lanier wrote in his book “Who Owns the Future” about Siren Servers. These are the computer servers that collect and move data around. That’s where economic power will reside in the future. He’s right.

The Loss of Context: The results of a Big Data project may give us some interesting answers about planning a transit program for a city. But what we don’t get from the data is context. The new transit routes might be good for fuel efficiency, but frustrating for those who use the buses and trains. Does the data adapt to us or must we adapt to the data? It’s our ability as humans to explore context that is critical to the proper use of Big Data. Not having context can mean perceptions are formed that become the narrative because the data isn’t understood.

These are I think, some of the bigger problems with Big Data. I intentionally didn’t cover security as that is already a hot discussion. These others less so, but equally important, perhaps more so, as they impact free will, democracy and freedom of speech.

What would you add?