Since the start of the internet age, we humans, along with the technology we use everyday generate an enormous amount of data every day—upwards of 3 exabytes every day in 2017. That’s 250,000 libraries of congress. Internet-enabled devices, including smartphones, have been or are becoming universally adopted and are essential to life even in the developing world . EMC estimates worldwide data generation in 2020 to be 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes.
Because the conveniences provided by this ubiquitous data access, internet services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have become a staple of our day to day lives. We’ve become accustomed to accessing all of this for free rather than paying for it. It isn’t really free though; we’re paying for these services with our data. In return for offering these services to us, these companies get to use the data they collect, which they may choose to sell or tailor their own marketing in order to get us to spend our money.
7 years ago at a tech conference panel, Google’s CEO announced that, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of man up until 2003.” That’s a staggering statistic, and one that Google has clearly taken to heart. Google’s holding company, Alphabet, is in the business of acquiring smaller companies and integrating them into its vast network. What’s even more ironic is that Google can use the very data it collects to predict which companies to target for assimilation.
All of this leads to what we call “big data”. Conclusions drawn from this data are not like normal statistical analysis. While it’s true that big data is about prediction, it’s about prediction from a different angle. Because of the depth, variety and scope of the data we create, corporations from every single industry on the planet can use that data to make predictions about nearly anything. Consumer buying habits, oil futures, voting results, airline tickets and even tracking earthquakes and the spread of viruses like bird flu.
Since the range of data is so wide and it can be used by whoever chooses to purchase it. All data is valuable to someone. In 2014, the Federal Trade Commission conducted a study of some of the world’s biggest data brokers and observed that they had data on 1.4 billion online transactions and had that data broken into 700 billion data elements. Those elements can include things like your gender, income level, what kind of car you drive, all the way down to your favorite color and how often you floss your teeth.
Online privacy isn’t about the big things like how much you share on Facebook, what you buy on Amazon or which political candidate you choose to retweet. Even the tiniest data points are being amalgamated and forming an profile of data that you have no, or at least very little, control over.
This isn’t all bad though. Parts can actually be useful. Those multi-zettabytes of data and the over 640 million websites on the internet would be so vast and useless on their own. This data allows the information you want to be filtered down to you. Allergic to shellfish? Well, you probably won’t be seeing the advertisement for the new seafood restaurant near your vacation spot and the thief who got ahold of your credit card won’t be able to order those new $400 sneakers because your closet full of sensible pumps suggests that would be very unlike you.
We live in an age of data and like it or not, it’s not going away. It’s also worth noting that a lot of data that we generate as a species is repetitive or simply junk and/or dog memes so take the above statistics with a grain of salt.