Less Privacy with Big Data

Imagine, you were wanting to buy a winter jacket and just in time someone rings your door bell and when you answer them, you see one of your friends holding a winter jacket at you. How would you react? I can imagine how much of excitement it brings in you. But my point here is, the online sellers such as PayPal and Amazon too want to draw you towards them by providing best of their service and offers.

But who is going to tell them what you want to buy? It is you through your browsing history, your purchase trends, buying habits based on your location and your shopping preferences. Data Science has enough intelligence and has learned so much about you that it can predict what your next purchase could be and how much are you willing to spend. Wait, nobody is spying on you, don’t worry; but you need to know, that is how business run these days and especially the online vendors wants to personalize your shopping experience with them because it is just going to increase their profit, helps them keep their customers loyal to them and more and more suppliers will want to sell with them, this is going to increase their market value and branding. Did you ever think, how much your data matters to them! Yes, it does.

PayPal uses Hadoop for customer sentiment analysis, fraud detection and market segmentation. The advent of Hadoop with traditional data platforms help data scientist exploratory queries for hypothesis testing and research on the data stored, the Business Intelligence analysts on the other hand can find answers to their reporting questions using in-memory systems like SAP HANA. Hadoop turned out to be a complementary and cost-effective data platform by helping PayPal manage their exponentially growing volume and variety of data. HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File Systems) a primary data storage system when used with HBase (NoSQL Hadoop Database) it leveraged the capability for PayPal to manage large unstructured datasets That was a quick overview on what PayPal uses to manage its data and harness the Big Data potential they hold; I’m now going to talk about using Data Analytics upon this data. The power of Data analytics is typically transformed into one of four categories: Descriptive, Predictive, Prescriptive and Discovery. Predictive analytics considers potential outcomes based on current or proposed strategies. Using advanced algorithms to find trends in historical data, the process can create accurate predictions of how a change will impact outcomes in terms of revenue, products sold, needed inventory and labor, among other areas. The goal is not 100 percent accuracy. Instead, predictive analytics seeks to provide detailed insight into potential outcomes. It’s also the type of analytics that helps online retailers such as PayPal determine what you will want to buy before maybe even you realize it.

How do I see my personal shopping and online browsing history being used for predictive analytics? Things that I consider before installing an app on my phone, what are the different access that it is requesting for and does it really need the access to function normally; for example, A Banking app doesn’t need access to my contacts if I choose not to refer anyone using my contacts. Money transfer apps doesn’t need access to my location history. I’m very particular about these. I decide what details of mine does the apps have access to. If they are stubborn enough to function normally without giving them requested access I chose not to use them at all. While making online payments or shopping I do not use my card details and bank details I always chose to pay with net banking option so that I have a trusted payment authentication gateway also If there are any options that say, “Save your card / bank details for future use?” I will choose not to save it. I feel we should be equally be responsible in protecting our privacy and data.

Is it just an inevitable part of our society’s technology today or should it be restricted? It is not inevitable part of our society’s technology but also, I do not see any reason to restrict them; as long as we are cautious about our data privacy and data analytics policies are in place I feel it is a boon to our society’s technology

Do you see an ethical dilemma based on consumer privacy? This is where the law comes in. At a baseline, if you are complying with relevant data privacy laws intended to protect consumers’ data, you can have more certainty that what you are doing is in line with the ethics of what most consumers would expect