While You Slept Last Night… Big Data, Privacy and the Public Square

by Chris Taylor, Forbes.Com

While you slept last night, the world around you continued to amass information about everything, including you. Banks processed your purchases. Your credit information was updated and redistributed. The electric company recorded your power usage. As Malte Spitz showed us in his TED piece, your cell phone on your nightstand dutifully reported your location.

We’ve more or less accepted this as part of our technological life. The alternative is to live ‘off the grid’ and outside the conversation. Few are willing to do that. …………….

There are plenty of benefits and problems with this. We can intervene as a medical crisis unfolds and we can keep the population safer from bad people doing bad things. But we can know too much, too. Paul Ohm describes this as a Database of Ruin, “…these databases will grow to connect every individual to at least one closely guarded secret.”  ………….

For companies needing to compete with increasing information and more powerful analytics, there are things to be doing right now. Being creepy is not a good strategy, nor is ignoring the opportunity to use some of what’s out there in the right ways. Finding the balance will mean doing several things very well. …… read the Article

DCL: The final chapter of my book, “Event Processing for Business” touches on the issue of using technology like CEP to build tools to help us monitor and control what others are doing with our own information footprints.  And indeed, what we are putting in our information footprints.

Good to see this topic has finally reach the TED lecture series!