Big Data - The End of Privacy. The End of Chance.

FutureWatch - BIG Data Knows All

• "Scientists have figured out that, with the help of our mobile phone geolocation and address book data, they can predict with some certainty where we will be tomorrow or at a certain time a year from now."

• "Some cities even predict the probability of crimes in certain neighborhoods. The method, known as "predictive policing," seems like something straight out of a Hollywood film, and in fact it is. In Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report," perpetrators were arrested for crimes they hadn't even committed yet."

• "Google predicted a wave of flu outbreaks on the basis of user searches."

• "American data specialist Nate Silver predicted the outcome of the last US presidential election well in advance and more precisely than all demographers."

• "TomTom, a Dutch manufacturer of GPS navigation equipment, had sold its data to the Dutch government. It then passed on the data to the police, which used the information to set up speed traps in places where they were most likely to generate revenue -- that is, locations where especially large numbers of TomTom users were speeding."

• "The more data is in circulation and available for analysis, the more likely it is that anonymity becomes "algorithmically impossible," says Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan. In his blog, Narayanan writes that only 33 bits of information are sufficient to identify a person."

• "Is it truly desirable for cultural assets like TV series or music albums to be tailored to our predicted tastes by means of data-driven analyses? What happens to creativity, intuition and the element of surprise in this totally calculated world?"

• "A dominant Big Data giant once inadvertently revealed how overdue a broad social and political debate on the subject is. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says that in 2010, the company toyed with the idea of predicting stock prices by means of incoming search requests. But, he said, the idea was discarded when Google executives concluded that it was probably illegal. He didn't, however, say that it was impossible." (more)