Privacy and Big Data

From Co-Authors Terence Craig, CEO, PatternBuilders and Mary Ludloff, VP Marketing, PatternBuilders

Why would two executives from a growing startup in the big data and analytics industry write a book on digital privacy? Well, in our business we deal with the issues of privacy every day as we support industries like financial services, retail, health care, and social media. So we’ve seen up close how the digital footprints we leave in our daily lives can be easily mashed up and, through expertise and technology, deliver startling accurate pictures of our behavior as well as increasingly accurate predictions of our future actions. Far more is known today about us as individuals than ever before. How organizations, businesses, and government agencies use this information to track and predict our behavior is becoming one of the fundamental issues of the 21st century.

As leaders in a company that provides tools to make this possible, it is important for us to understand the issues of privacy as it applies to big data sets, singularly and in aggregate. We must do what we can to make sure that the significant benefits of big data analytics are maximized (consumer choice, improved health care, protection from terrorism) while the negatives are minimized (lack of privacy, political suppression, genetic discrimination). Of course, we do this for the obvious moral reasons. But there are ...