Do you know how Big Data affects you?

Are you aware of Big Data and how it is impacting your lives? Big Data is a term used to describe large volumes of structured or unstructured data used by a business on a day-to-day basis. Structured data includes numbers, dates, groups of words and numbers called strings; whereas unstructured data includes text and multimedia content, for example email messages, documents, videos, photos, audio files and web pages. But it’s not the amount of data that’s important, it’s what organisations can do with this data that matters.

We live in the Information Age. People have more data at their fingertips than ever before. However, data is useless unless individuals can find what they need. When we conduct a research on the internet we usually find too much information. We then modify our search criteria to narrow it down. We need a way to manage all this data and use it without having to read through hundreds of articles.

According to researchers, customer data when used in an area other than the intended area may lead to problems that can get worse over time, the simplest problems are customer fraud. For example, credit card purchases can make personal information available to market researchers, telemarketers and direct-mail companies. Also, hackers find social networking opportunities to breach privacy of network users. Most new apps and sites require birthday date and email addresses to login, others prompt users to use location based services.

Additionally, now technological development is affecting politics. Channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are used by politicians as platforms for campaigning, communication and to raise political support.

New challenges that have not been dealt with before in the society are beginning to materialise. People are becoming more aware of the increasing complexity of information and data security and the ethical concerns. Since it’s our world and future, we should be concerned and involved in its resolution. We must develop the strategies and plans to deal with big data and its potential problems.

■ The reader is a lecturer at the University of Sharjah.