Big Data is now ubiquitous. No longer confined to niche fields like astrophysics, genomics and machine learning, the analysis of massive databases is now applied to such diverse areas as retailing, human resources, traffic management, energy consumption or healthcare. Big Data already provides imaginative solutions to countless social, economic, and commercial problems that seemed intractable just a few years ago. No industry or aspect of life is immune to the radical changes set in motion by the “datafication” of the world and this poses unprecedented challenges to governments, firms and workers alike.
Volume, variety and velocity are the three key features that set Big Data apart from old-fashioned analytics. Across the world, billions of electronic devices generate approximately three exabytes of data every day and the amount of digital information in the world doubles every three years. According to some estimates, less than 2% of all stored information is now non-digital as opposed to 75% in 2000.
This data explosion takes the form of images and messages posted on social networks, online books, readings from sensors, GPS signals from cell phones, credit cards transactions, medical records and much more. All of this is made possible by increased storage capacity and processing power that allow the transformation of hitherto unquantified phenomena into data. And, unlike the past, much of this information becomes available in real time, providing its owner with a clear competitive advantage over his rivals.
This is the Big Data Revolution: access to massive amounts of variegated information that is processed through smart algorithms and clever software to spot patterns, glean insights and see the world from new perspectives.
The economic and political advantages of a data-driven decision-making process are huge. Through in depth knowledge of the preferences of their customers, firms create new markets and drive more sales through personalized products. At the same time, workers can focus on carrying out the most sophisticated and stimulating tasks, while saddling data-fed machines with the most repetitive and boring ones. From a societal viewpoint, big data helps increase the transparency of democratic governance, improve the efficiency in the provision of public services, address global problems like climate change or eradicate diseases before they spiral out of control.
There are drawbacks of course. The enormous data sets that make up Big Data are not always clean, accurate and ordered. When the scale increases by orders of magnitude, messiness is inevitable. In addition, more data does not necessarily imply better data; strong correlations do not necessarily mean causation. Biases and blind spots exist in big data as well as in the algorithms that are used to analyze the data, to say nothing of issues raised by big data concerning the violation of citizens’ privacy, the threats to national security, the danger of technological unemployment, the political manipulation of data-driven information, and the monopolist abuses of the tech giants that collect the data.
Big Data is set to reshape society, the economy and the world. But there are many paths that can be undertaken. Building appropriate digital infrastructures, debating the drawing up of a “Magna Charta” for the Internet, establishing web-related categories of human rights and clearly assigning the ownership of the cloud are all necessary steps to optimize the management of Big Data. It is up to governments, corporations and citizens to turn the digital paradigm into a major boost for innovation and human empowerment, without endangering national security, privacy protection and employment opportunities.