Goodbye Privacy: Big Data Is Coming to Town
Keith Fitz-Gerald
Market Oracle
Jul 16, 2013
Just like the Christmas song, “He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows when you’ve been bad or good…”
But nowadays it isn’t Santa, it’s Big Data. And it’s becoming big business.
What can companies do with big data?
Get this:
Retail giant Target (NYSE: TGT), thanks to its proprietary big data and it’s big data mining techniques, reportedly figured out that a teenage girl was pregnant before her parents did.
As the story goes, the girl’s unsuspecting father was understandably upset a) because the store supposedly sent maternity coupons to the family’s house and b) he wasn’t adequately supervising his daughter’s extracurricular activities, according to Forbes.com.
This certainly begs the question of where does a store’s ability to predictively target its sales begin to infringe upon your privacy? – I’m not so sure we know as a society…yet.
But I do know that until there are proper guidelines – and probably thereafter – big data will be big business.
Now, I’ll admit right up front that I’m the first person in line when it comes to keeping the government’s greasy meat hooks out of my personal information and corporations from mining my data.
But even I couldn’t resist a look at MIT’s Immersion program when I heard about it.
They’re All Watching
The Rest…HERE
