The transparent society in the era of Big Data

“Big Data is about much more than just correlating database tables and creating pattern recognition algorithms. It’s about money and power.”[7]

While talking about the benefits of Big Data and Analytics in the field of manufacturing and other businesses to improve processes or even predict and prevent certain events, a lot of data produced nowadays originates from people. Google, Smart Devices like Smart Watches, Smart Phones or Fitness Gadgets as well as Social Media platforms like Facebook and Twitter collect and store a tremendous amount of unstructured data every day and thereby track our habits and behaviors.

What enables the analysis of social, unstructured data nowadays?
Besides the sensor data of the smart devices we use on a daily basis most of the data produced by humans is unstructured. We tweet and post text, pictures and videos, which can be considered as a lot of variety in social data. Moreover a large amount of data is produced every day. Mentioned in Jeff Welser’s presentation “over 1 billion tweets are sent every 2 days”[1], which underlines the volume as well as partially the velocity aspect of Big Data. [2] Especially sensors are producing data constantly, for instance data about geolocation, heart rate and sleep intensity is collected.
Due to the era of big data and the progress in storage and processing as well as analysis algorithms we are now enabled to analyze even unstructured social data. Algorithms like text mining and sentiment analysis are improving constantly and can drive the extraction of information and emotions from posts or more generally written text. Improvement can be achieved through training these algorithms with loads of accessible, historical datasets. [3]

Customer benefits of social big data
The fact that a lot of data about us and our behavior is gather leads to the question, if it is beneficial for customers or only for companies profit’s sake. Sure companies want to improve their marketing strategies to increase their earnings. When they have insights into customer’s preferences and behavior they are able to tailor offers to the customer’s need or individualize advertisements and thereby realize a direct customer approach. [3][4]
Many of us might have experienced personalized ads on Facebook due to our recent online searches or behavior on social media, through likes and comments, as well as Amazon recommendations based on our searches and buys.
But is it really helpful for ourselves or does it rather push us to buy more than we usually would, which results in benefitting the companies rather than ourselves? Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to improve products to fit customer needs or even use data to locate and solve current (user) problems?

…and its downsides
Besides using personal data in psychological targeting to improve marketing or products, it can also be misused. Recent events showed the power certain parties can obtain, due to the ability to extract “psychological characteristics of individuals or small groups of people”, and thereby influence or even manipulate behavior through tailored content. Most recent and probably most famous example is the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in politics respectively the US election and Brexit. They collected data about more than 220 million Americans to profile their personality and thereby be able to tailor campaign messages and distribute them only to recipients open to these messages. Computational social scientist Sandra Matz mentioned that the problem is not the existence of psychological targeting itself but “the lack of legal regulations to control and restrict the application of such technologies”. [5][6]
The Big Data Ethics where already thematized in 2014 outlining the importance of establishing big data norms like privacy, confidentiality of shared data and transparency. [7]

In essence this is targeting the ethical aspects of big data we need to discuss and think about now, not only regarding specific methods like psychological targeting but big data and analytics in general. Because who wants to be manipulable through the accessibility of personal data?

References:
[1] Wesler, Jeff: Cloud Platforms for the Cognitive Era, Stanford, 7 July 2017
[2] Ishikawa, Hiroshi: Social Big Data Mining, CRC Press, 2015
[3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1566253515000780
[4] https://www.brillio.com/solutions/social-profiling
[5] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win
[6] https://www.dasmagazin.ch/2016/12/22/need-control-psychological-targeting/
[7] http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/03/whats-up-with-big-data-ethics.html