Analysis Of Big Data And Privacy

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We live in the Information Age, an era that began with the advent of personal computers and has continued with the creation and widespread use of the Internet and many other forms of digital technology. The storage of data on digital mediums has only accelerated during this period and is expected to continue growing for the foreseeable future. This data comes in hundreds of varying forms and whether its credit card history, atmospheric weather conditions, surveillance footage or cell phone records it can now all be collected and stored almost indefinitely. These massive databases are maintained and controlled by a variety of entities including companies, governments and organizations. These collections of data are now referred to as big data. Large scale computer analysis of these databases using complex algorithms allows their owners to draw conclusions and find relationships that they may not have even been looking for. This brings up a multitude of legal and ethical questions surrounding how these conclusions and relationships are used and how they affect the individuals whose information was used to find them. Tom Price writes about many different examples in his article Big Data and Privacy and differentiates between certain cases. In purely scientific cases, for example the search for the Higgs-Boson particle at CERN, these questions do not arise because the data is entirely technical measurements and does not affect individuals. On the other end of the spectrum though are cases such as the NSA’s widespread collection of cellular data and other information to combat terrorism or Facebook’s secret compilation of data on users and nonusers from sources beyond their own social network. Both instances are highly contro...

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...then be transmitted to a database. In this database the information could be compared to other medical histories and if there was a sign of a possible medical condition about to occur, such as a heart attack or seizure, the user would be notified. While the benefits to this type of data analysis are clear, many people are still worried about how long the data remains stored for. As processing power continues to increase there may soon no longer be a need to store the data. Instead the information from all these new sensors could be collected and analyzed concurrently which would allow for trends and relationships to be identified in real time. This would avoid the negatives of having personal data stored permanently and also increase the benefits because now when a trend or relationship is discovered a user can take action immediately to take advantage of it.

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