What is big data? Easily explained
The term big data has been circulating on the Internet since the NSA and BND affair. What you read on the subject of privacy protection is interesting and often a little daunting. However, the current headlines only deal with a small section of so-called big data. We explain what this actually means here.
Big Data - Big Brother's little brother?
Big data is actually only large amounts of data. In principle, it is a value-free term. Whether big data should be scary or not depends on what type of data it is. As soon as the data is personal, surveillance is suspected.
- A large amount of data is called big data if the scope is too large or too complex to process by hand. This is especially true for data that is constantly changing.
- Big data can be innocuous data from climate research. However, data about people is also collected: communication behavior, consumer behavior or surfing behavior of Internet users. You can see the effects of big data analysis every day on the Internet. A typical example is personalized advertising.
What do you do with big data?
With this question it gets a little trickier. It doesn't make sense to collect large amounts of data on your own. Only the evaluation of the data complicate the whole thing.
- Data only becomes interesting when it is evaluated. This applies to both secret services and companies. And this is where the problem of big data lies: Personal rights are touched by the mere gathering of data, but it becomes critical with the evaluation. Because personal data may be passed on to third parties here, which often violates personal rights.
- As described in the first paragraph, big data is no longer so easy to process. There are special frameworks that analyze the data. Open source software for this is Hadoop, for example.
- In addition to companies that hope for higher sales from the data and the resulting market analyzes, there is also big data in research. The knowledge about climate change also comes from the collection and evaluation of large amounts of data - big data.
- The state also relies on big data. In the field of crime fighting, collecting and evaluating large amounts of data is not only a headache for data protection officers.
Big data itself is actually worthless. However, critical areas that affect privacy are mostly affected. You can hardly escape the rage of the state and companies these days. The Internet alone is a large data pool that is often skimmed off. If you want to know what Google knows about you, you can find out with our instructions.