Big Data: the Invisible Force Shaping Our Lives

Big Data: The Invisible Force Shaping Our Lives

Have you ever noticed the ads that show up in your browser while you search the web or on your favorite social media site? Or that they change depending on what you have been searching for on Google or what pages you are affiliated with on social media? No? That’s ok, most people don’t realize that everything they do on the internet is being tracked and compiled into usable data that is being sold to companies all over the world for a hefty penny. Now this may seem unfair, but it is actually quite legal because when you sign up for all of these sites and agree to their terms, you sign away your right to that data. Scary, I know, but there are many good things that come out of this area of expertise. What has been described here is known as Big Data, or the collection and organization of vast quantities of data.

Big data allows a company to advertise to a specific group of people, fitting a specific set of standards, or to find out what people need. The applications of big data is practically endless, which is rather exciting. For example, Google is one of the first companies to use big data tactics on a large scale. They used big data to compile every website on the internet, while allowing people to manipulate the data based off of key words. Now this is quite an accomplishment, but they haven’t stopped there. Google was able to track the spread of influenza through the United States better than the Center of Disease Control (Naughton). This was done by simply tracking the location of people searching for terms associated with the disease, and when they found a large number of people in one area, they knew there was an outbreak. This is extremely cheap, efficient, and fast compared to the standard government tactics.

The industry has been on the rise for the past couple of years. “90% of the world’s data has been created in the past two years” (McCafferty). The trouble that teams are having is what to do...