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!
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