Submitted by Gerti
If you want to know what this book is about, you have to read the reviews on the back cover, as they are brilliant summaries of what the notion of "Big Data" encompasses. They include blurbs from Marc Benioff, the chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, a major American computer company, and Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor. The quote I like the best, though, is from a person named Clay Shirky, who says, "Just as water is wet in a way that individual water molecules aren't, big data can reveal information in a way that individual bits of data can't." that clarifies things for my non-scientific mind.
It was not an easy book to read, as I'm not a computer science major, or even someone who's read a computer textbook before. But it is fascinating, as it brings into focus how computers and the information they crunch are effecting personal privacy and our understanding of life in general. The first example of Big Data the two authors use is how Google knew about what areas of the US were being hit by a flu outbreak, based on what their users were searching for. I'm not bothered by Google holding on to that information if the result is potentially a way the government and its health organizations can keep track of the spread of a disease. However, the authors here highlight the darker side of that information-that knowing who looks up flu might someday lead Google to telling the government which people should be quarantined, especially if we ever ran across a "black plague" type situation. This happens in horror movies about zombies, where sometimes healthy people are held back with the infected ones, and while that is obviously scary, it is clearly fictional. This book implies that a similar situation, involving a very real disease outbreak, could well occur, especially if someone is watching what you search for on your computer or listening to what you say on your cell phone.
I like how the pair of authors point to examples where government information gathering has been used in negative ways even in the past, for example, how Census data helped the US government put Japanese citizens into internment camps during World War II. But the two men also show the upside of gathering Big Data-how companies like Amazon show you what books you might be interested in buying today based on your past purchases. I was just pleased today at how E-Bay was doing the same think for me when I logged in this morning.
Is it worth reading? Yes-I will even purchase it for my home library. I also hope to buy a few extra copies for friends of mine who work in the computer industry, as the book points out some lucrative "Big Data" job opportunities in the near future. But like the authors, I also worry about how the vast collections of personal information may someday effect our lives in a negative way.
No comments:
Post a Comment