Big Data presents several potential ethical and social challenges

Hi everyone, 

In this blog post I will discuss Big Data. One of the largest concerns about big data is the potential ethical and social challenges that come with it. This blog post will outline and explain the reasoning of these potential challenges.

Before outlining the challenges, I have noticed the personalisation of advertisements on my social media accounts being very accurate to my interests, with sports and gaming advertisements appearing most frequently. This data has been gathered by these organisations and used to personalise my accounts to make them more relatable to me. I am sure you can notice this personalisation yourself across your social media accounts. In my opinion, it is not a surprise that ethical and social challenges may arise from this as individuals may feel like there is no limit to the information an organisation has gathered and is holding.

Potential challenges include: 

Privacy: Big Data gathers information about every aspect of a person. Sometimes it may feel like the data gathered does not have a filter and people may feel that their privacy has been disregarded. The data gathered can be seen as too personal or sensitive.

Consent: Consent is very important and must be confirmed before gathering any data. Big data gathers information from several different sources. This may lead to individuals feeling that they have not given the consent to the advancements made by using their data. Once again, the personalisation aspect may become too personal or sensitive for individuals and this can cause issues to arise.

Security: As there is a large volume of data being gathered, concerns may arise as to how secure it is. Hackers are becoming more prevalent in modern society with issues like identity theft occurring more often. Therefore, it is a challenge to keep up with the security of individual's personal data as technology is advancing at a very fast rate. We can assume that with technology advancing, it is more likely for data to be breached for unethical reasons.

When researching further on this topic, I came across a video that I believe outlines how each of these three challenges may have been breached. The video outlines a potential situation where an individual is accessing free Wifi at a store. When accessing the service the user is required to provide their email address, or log in using a social media application of their choice. When providing this, there was a box to tick if the user wanted to opt out of being tracked by the server. If a user was in a rush to access the Wifi they may have skipped past this. This allows the server to gather and sell the user's data. Over time, the amount of emails from different services increase and it becomes a constant spam. 

Potential services where free Wifi is provided are your local shopping centres, pubs, and fast food restaurants. This collection of data can affect anyone. Be careful!

Video Link: Ethics and trust in a digital age: Big data and analytics - YouTube

Leave a comment below outlining any experiences you have had where you feel that Big Data may have invaded your privacy or security. I would love to hear your thoughts!

See you next time!

Building CRM knowledge and earn credentials

Hi everyone, 

This week I completed three online courses provided by Trailhead which further educated me on my topic of interest which was Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is becoming more and more prevalent in our day to day lives so it is a topic that I find interest in. 

If you are interested in completing some online courses yourself, click on the link below which will give you access to 'Trailhead' and their services. I would recommend it! 

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/

The first course I completed was a 10 minute course called 'Getting to know Marketing AI'. The course was more of an introduction to marketing AI, where I learned how AI is used to benefit marketing by increasing creativity and efficiency. I learned how AI can be used in content/campaign creation to increase creativity. GPT can provide you with ideas for your content or campaign in seconds, therefore increasing both creativity and efficiency. Another interesting use of Marketing AI was through conversational interfaces, which can manage marketing campaigns and simplify the use of technology throughout the campaign.  

The second course I completed was a 20 minute course called 'Change Management for AI Implementation'. When completing this course I noticed a lot of similarities to the content covered in class about the implementation of new information systems. This course focused on change management which is a set of processes used to ensure the successful implementation of AI into an organisation. I learned that before beginning the process, organisations must train their staff, outline possible challenges they may face, ensure AI is suitable in the long run and aim to have consistency when it comes to where AI is used in their workforce. 

The third course I completed was a 30 minute course called 'Artificial Intelligence for Marketing'. This course provided short videos with examples of email marketing and push notifications being used. I learned how AI can be used to send automatic emails, personalise the emails and gather data on customers. I learned that the more customers interact with the emails/notifications the more personalisation organisations can achieve, therefore increasing brand loyalty. 

If you completed any online courses provided by Trailhead, let me know in the comments below. I would love to hear what your recommendations for other readers and what you learned in the process!

That's all for me in this blog. Thanks for reading! If you found interest in this blog, keep an eye out for many more blog posts in the future. 

See you next time!