One of life’s many unanswered questions: who does big data belong to?

Hailed by some as one of the greatest benefits of the internet, big data is seen by others as an attack on privacy.

Big data is one of those big buzzwords hanging around the moment, but the phrase is often thrown about with no inkling of what it actually means. Whoever you ask, you get a different definition every time.

I’m no techie, but here’s my working definition:

Big data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources inside and outside your company that represents a monetizable resource when used for ongoing discovery and analysis.

Money

Monetizing big data. That’s the reason why big companies are so eager to keep control.

For example, Google has just launched a service for storing big data out of old tech they’ve been using for years. Facebook has built a database out of more than a billion people. Netflix uses it to figure out what movies we’d like to watch. These and other companies have built financial empires on big data.

Control

In the UK, the newly-elected government wants to re-introduce the Snooper’s Charter. This requires internet and mobile companies to keep a record of customers’ browsing activity for up to a year.

Whether this will prove useful for the government or the public sector is unknown as yet. But it represents an exercise of control of big data which is equally controversial.

Ownership

Hackers, governments and reputable companies alike work hard to own our data.

We happily leave our data all over the Internet like a trail of breadcrumbs. We sign up to new services every day, implicitly expecting every internet company to use our data in a responsible way.

If we all own our data, we should have more control over how it’s used. Or is it really just a tool for government and big business?

Photo credit of npr.org.