Above all the hue and cry over big data and the benefits to enterprises and customers, a question which used to keep coming to my mind – isn’t something wrong? With whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange making news and making us aware of the perils of this ‘data’ which supposedly helps us get better products and connect us to what we need is a different perspective on big data. Aren’t we closing our doors to change and the other man-made/natural wonders of the world?

Agreed, social media like Facebook, Twitter etc. and online storage media like Google Docs, DropBox, Flickr etc. are helpful in a lot of ways. Share content and updates on the go, connect with all the people you want to in the world, predict the next financial crisis or the weather, one doesn’t have to worry anymore about running out of space and missing out on retaining memories to be cherished. But the question to be asked is at what cost are we getting all this? Like Newton’s 3rd law says, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction or like saying that nothing is free and everything in this world comes with a rider or at an opportunity cost (Ask this to those thousands taking the plunge into the world of MBA after quitting their jobs!), can big data or information we as customers share through various digital media hit back at us or the enterprise?

You’ll be blocked out from everything else there is in the world. All those beautiful things which you ‘may’ like; window shopping where one takes what one likes on the go. The odd news/information about advances in technology (for the not so tech savvy), the news about politics (for the ones who are oblivious to anything other than scams and corruption), those products which once an enterprise could think of pushing to you, that comic which would help you laugh out loud and forget the world for those few seconds. But like every product this is also a supply driven push which generates the demand! The momentum and technology is probably too large to stop this. Data will keep flowing and we’ll constantly and gradually be shut down from most of it!

To summarise there’s this interesting TED talk, Beware online “filter bubbles” by Eli Pariser, which got me thinking.

Confessions from a data analyst, who has left nothing undisclosed through social media!

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