There has been a great deal of discussion in recent years that "Big Data" is the next big thing in the world of technology and business. In our increasingly data-intensive world, Big Data is proclaimed by its proponents as bringing about a new era of innovation and economic growth. But as increasingly large amounts of data are collected, stored and analyzed about individuals, privacy advocates have also raised concerns that Big Data may endanger, if not end, personal privacy and lead to the world depicted in the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, where individuals are under constant surveillance and viewed almost entirely as a collection of data bits. Given the strong opinions held by both sides, it is important to unpack the meaning of the Big Data phenomenon and its alleged dangers to personal privacy.
Big Data, as the term is typically used, has several different facets. As technology, Big Data refers to hardware that is capable of sorting and analyzing a massive amount of data in a short period of time. As a process, Big Data refers to finding patterns or other analytical results from such data. In more general terms, Big Data is shorthand for digital data that is so large and unstructured that it cannot be stored or managed by traditional relational database tools.
