Technological progress has always led to heated debates about the threats a new technology would pose for society and humanity. When in the 15^th century printing press was invented, monks viewed easily available books that were unapproved by the church as a threat to their control over learning. The respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, feared that the information overload caused by the printing press could be confusing and harmful to people. Similar concerns were made when newspapers became more available in the 18^th century. The French statesman Malesherbes feared that newspapers would isolate readers. When in the 19^th century education came more generally available, it was thought that it was a risk to mental health. The radio would distract children, while the invention of television was thought to hurt radio, conversation, reading, and the patterns of family living.

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It is time to understand what the impact of big data will be on organisations and whether organisations are already occupied with big data or not. Therefore we have created the Global Big Data Impact survey. The survey will give insights in how organisations from around the world are developing a big data strategy, which organisation have already started with a big data strategy and what the impact of big data is on organisations.

They survey takes only 5-10 minutes to complete. In order to validate the outcomes, as many people as possible should participate, so please share it among your followers in your social networks to broaden the reach. We will make the outcomes publicly available.

Since McKinsey wrote a well-known report about big data in May 2011 and called it the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, we have come a long way. In the past year 12% of organisations have developed a big data strategy, while 70% of the respondents of a SAS survey said that they were planning or already started a big data project. More interesting however, is that 21% don’t know enough about big data, while 15% did not understand the benefits of big data for their organisation. So, while slowly more organisations are implementing a big data strategy, there is still a large part that has no clue about big data. When organisations do not understand big data, there probably is a large part of the consumers that have no clue about big data either.

Continue reading “Big Data will have a big impact on society, but what will be the impact of society on big data?” »

Big data is everywhere and more and more products are getting sensors and collect data. Thanks to the quantified-self movement, there are so many (free) apps that collect a lot of information of users. However, in the world of big data nothing is for free. Free products or services that are offered to users are paid for with data and it is unclear who owns that data from then on. What the effect on privacy or ethical issues will be is also not clear and there already is a movement that users want to pay for a service with money instead of data. A great example is App.net where users pay a monthly fee to use the services add-free.  Facebook on the other hand is losing users, partly because of the privacy issues and partly because of the amount of advertisements that show up in your timeline nowadays.

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BigData-Startups.com is the only dedicated and independent big data platform. The objective of the platform is to help organisations and individuals understand the power of big data, but also learn more about big data technologies, open source tools, trends, big data strategies and also the other side of big data: privacy and ethics.

Do you want to join in growing this platform and share your knowledge with the world? That is possible!

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The possibilities of big data are enormous, but moving into the big data era carelessly will have massive ethical and privacy impacts. We should master the technology and not the other way around. The goal is to develop better ways how to use the unprecedented computing power to our advantage without intruding on our privacy or ethical standards. In this post I would like to make a first start with developing a set of principles that eventually organisations should adhere to. So please leave your comments and share this article so that together we can create these big data principles and start the discussion on big data privacy and ethical issues.

Continue reading “Big Data Ethics: 4 principles to follow by organisations” »