Big Data = Big Brother?

More than 90% of all electronic data in the world was generated in just the last two years. Internet companies such as Facebook and Google are rapidly amassing vast amounts of information (often summarized under the term Big Data) that can be grouped, analyzed and used in different ways.

Facebook's research department recently analyzed how people in different countries post their messages and what information about their lives they choose to share. In particular, it turned out that the posts are getting shorter every year. This reflects both the growing popularity of fast public communication services such as Twitter, and a steady trend towards the increasing use of pictures instead of text. This also explains the popularity of the Instagram service, especially among young people, since there is no need to write anything at all.

“Internet companies have enormous advantages simply because of the amount of data they themselves accumulate and store, something that social scientists can only dream of,” says Petter Bae Brandtzæg of the Norwegian independent research organization SINTEF ICT. But he immediately agrees that this fundamentally changes the approach to social research and in organizations such as SINTEF, since even scientists who do not work for large Internet companies can easily access these data sets for analysis.

“This gives me access to data on about 20 million people without even having to do a single search query! I can analyze the preferences of different groups of Facebook users around the world in terms of their age, gender, country of residence, etc. For example, we compared differences in social activity on Facebook between men and women in Norway, Spain, England, the USA, Russia, Egypt, India and China,” he notes.

Questions about the protection of personal information are often asked in connection with discussions of the use of Big Data. But, according to P. Brandtzeg, research access to data is limited only to anonymized aggregated information on large groups of people, and there is no individual data there. Therefore, such sociological research does not violate any laws on the protection of personal information and privacy.

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Based on materials site
http://www.sintef.no/en/news/big-data—for-better-or-worse/