The fourth area which I think is something which we should ignore at our peril. I’ve already alluded to big data. I’m not very keen on the term big data, and I tend to think of it as data which have not traditionally been used to produce research or insight, and data science, as a corollary, is a conflation the new methods of data manipulation and belarus rcs data analytics which can be used on those data. Some of these ‘new methods’ are actually old methods warmed up, and some of them are truly new.
The particular forms of ‘big data’ which I am particularly interested in are those which contain information about people, and people who have not explicitly given their consent for the reuse of these data for any particular purposes (informed consent).
We all know of examples of where ‘big data’ can have a potential for societal benefit: hospital admission records could help private care providers be more efficient; search activities could potentially assist law and order agencies in pre-empting civil unrest; tracking data from mobile devices may allow commercial organisations to target advertising more effectively; surveillance images have the potential to monitor power usage at a macro level. The possibilities are endless, and mostly positive, but each of these particular opportunities would be likely to cause considerable disquiet amongst a majority of people who are represented in the underlying data.