Sunday, September 9, 2012

What can Google do with its data (Big Data)?

I read a recent post by a famous database architect highlighting the same question in SIGMOD blogs.

Google now has the data of all its users (suppose its 90% of all the net users)
According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm, the total internet users in the world are around 2.2 billion of the total 6.9 billion population as of last december (2011).

It means google has the data of around 1/3rd of world's population. 
What data google has?
Lets suppose a person A has been using Google for the past 7 years.
Now google has the following information about this person A

1)How many times A searched google
2)What are the topics A searched in google for the past 7 years with all the statistics per each topic; now this information is a very critical part of the analytics, by viewing the results you can easily find out what kind of a person A has been for the past 7 years.
does he like sex? does he like movies more? does he like technical stuff more etc etc
3) At what times of the day A does his searches? this information shows how many hours A spends on google, though we can't determine by this whether he is employed or sitting at home (of course this info we can find out by checking the source ip from which A is doing his search)
4) what are the likes and dislikes of A?
5) Does A hate someone?
6) Who are A's family, you can easily get this by linking his facebook/twitter and other accounts as most of the accounts have gmail as the user id
7) whether A wants to commit suicide? is he depressed or frustrated? does he want to kill someone?
8) how popular is A; you can get this info by checking how many friends he has, how many likes he get in his social network site.

There are so many things you can do with this data; you can check if A wants to buy something this weekend? what are his plans for the weekend? his outings etc etc

If we consider all this, then its not a wise decision to store all our data in google or facebook.
Its good to keep it in our hard disks and share it only with our close friends and relatives when necessary. Ofcourse if its a sensitive thing then donot ever put it online ( especially something about your past relationships :)  )

what happens when this vital data about you is stolen and falls into a terrorist organization or Police department.
what happens if this information is percieved seriously by the Crime branches?
There is a serious threat to all if we continue to share our information and be part of Big Data.
These are definitely worrisome signs. 
This is just a tip of the iceberg.
If you combine all of your mobile (phone) voice data, internet data,  social networking data and google (search engine) data then you are just left with nothing to hide.
There won't be a single thing that you can hide from the Big Data.

What does all this indicate? 
This is definitely leading to another world which we humans created and that's what people say the cyber world. 
So by the end of 21st century, humans created a pseudo world called "internet" and dumped all their data into it and spent all their lives in this pseudo world and slowly started forgetting the real world.

Where is the real world that we live? no where?
we spend 8-10 hours of a day in office, 1-2 hours on phone, 1-2 hours on the internet and then we eat and sleep; there is just no time for us to live in this real world.
We created two days for ourselves called "saturday" and "sunday" and started to feel that these two days are the real days to spend quality time with our families and with the nature.

2 comments:

  1. Chaitu.... awesome blog... Yes! we are addicting to internet, computers .. Life is going in different direction.

    Private date on public domains(google, facebook)...Very good point. We need to be very careful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. yes true dantam, thanks for passing by

    ReplyDelete