Big Data : An Exploration of Opportunities, Values, and Privacy Issues

We are living in the midst of a social, economic, and technological revolution. How we communicate, socialize, spend leisure time, and conduct business has moved onto the Internet. The Internet has in turn moved into our phones, into devices spreading around our homes and cities, and into the factories that power the industrial economy. The resulting explosion of data and discovery is changing our world. Most definitions of big data reflect the growing technological ability to capture, aggregate, and process an ever-greater volume, velocity, and variety of data. Big data will transform the way we live and work and alter the relationships between government, citizens, businesses, and consumers. This book focuses on how the public and private sectors can maximize the benefits of big data while minimizing its risks. It also identifies opportunities for big data to grow our economy, improve health and education, and make our nation safer and more energy efficient. The book continues by exploring the changing nature of privacy as computing technology has advanced and big data has come to the forefront; identifying the sources of these data, the utility of these data; the privacy challenges big data poses in a world where technologies for re-identification often outpace privacy-preserving de-identification capabilities; and where it is increasingly hard to identify privacy-sensitive information at the time of its collection.