The New York Times ran a piece airing
concerns about the collection of big data and privacy. George Orwell gets a
name check. More to the point is a comment from
Microsoft's Craig Mundie: “There's no bad data, only bad uses of data.”
I know this is only a soundbite, but it's
kind of chewy. Clearly, there is bad data. There's data that's wrong,
and data that is wrongly tagged. There's also data that's badly used from
structural causes. That is, rather than some evil genius cackling and using
honest data for bad ends, the clean data has been incorrectly related to other
data within a storage schema.
If you model your data incorrectly, you
create structural misuse of data. And this is where the real dangers lie. The
way to guard against structural misuse is to exploit established, trusted data
standards wherever possible.
Equally, safeguarding privacy concerns will have to mean the incorporation of privacy markers in the data models for relevant applications. For example, mobile healthcare apps should be using personal data standards that include a privacy marker for age (or date of birth).
Big Data is Opening Doors
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