Does Your Mother Know Where You Are? Big Data Does!

We just finished our tax returns for 2013, plugged our meagre contribution into the laptop, and off it goes to the Canadian Revenue Agency. Then I remembered that it was just last week when the Heartbleed Bug 'stole' the private data of over 900 Canadians from the CRA! I don't know if we were one of the 900, but without any hesitation I sent them more data and only then remembered the breach. Why are we so trustful ? After all, it took them more than thirty-six hours before dealing with the problem.

But then I remembered, what the hell difference does it make! During the past few years organizations have been tracking my behaviour, gathering data on me constantly: credit cards, banking, the gas pump, TV, emails, phones, digital books, taxi rides, social media, music and movies downloads, politicians, health care, place of employment - you get the picture.  Indeed, just about everyone, even those without devices, have data about them uploaded to the great beyond every day. All that information is piling up in some huge real-time data warehouse. In fact there is so much information being tracked world wide that, until recently, the quantity became so large and complex that it was impossible to process it with the available management tools and data processing applications. Enter Big Data! It has been said that from the beginning of civilization to 2003, mankind has generated five exabytes of data. (I had to look that up to understand the meaning. It means 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes. I hope that was helpful!) Today we produce five of these exabytes every two days and, more importantly, we now have the tools to analyze it. Welcome to the world of Big Data.

Talk about your 'carbon footprint', what is the number of your 'digital footprint'? Now the debate begins. Is availability of so much information about us good, bad or ugly? One thing is sure it is going to change the way all of us experience our lives.


When sailing a small boat on the ocean we learned how important a simple barometer can be. By monitoring and recording the weather conditions every day and equating that to the numbers on the barometer, after a couple of weeks we were able to predict, and prepare for future weather changes. With Big Data we will be able to change the world as we now know it by predicting disasters, fighting crime, reducing carbon, curing disease, avoiding automobile accidents. By monitoring her Supermarket loyalty card activity it knew one of their customers was pregnant, based on her changing buying habits! Lady Gaga uses Big Data to determine her most popular type songs. Maternity wards can use it to monitor and prevent medical problems before they occur. Facebook inserts a  tracking cookie into your word browser to track each website you visit. (If you haven't adjusted your security settings!) Politicians can determine where they have to campaign the hardest. The uses are legion. No wonder Edward Snowden was concerned about the U.S. National Security Agency collecting and analyzing  phone records and social media of millions of Americans.

So Big Data has a lot to offer and a lot to be concerned about. But we have all been sucked into the great vacuum in the sky, so what do we do? It's the new reality and any attempts to hide totally is now  impossible. Of course there are ways to hide your online identity such as P2P (Peer-to-Peer networks - for a monthly cost!) and EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation - if you want to protect your democratic freedoms!) Except for changing your passwords regularly and being alert, you are out there. Indeed, to try to hide totally is counterproductive as most of us intentionally use social networks, like this Blog, because we want to be out there and involved with our friends and the world around us. Besides, given the past winter, living in a cave is not a reasonable alternative.

So bring on Big Data and hope that in the end its benefits will far exceed its potential negative abuses. Thanks Big Data, and I am looking forward to your exciting contributions to the health and welfare of our little planet called, by us anyway, WORLD.

And that's Dick's View of the World this Week