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The Big Data phenomenon has in recent months gained increased awareness among privacy advocates, governments across the globe, and business interests. In May 2014 the Executive Office of the President of the USA concluded a comprehensive three-month review of the current and possible future impact of Big Data on society, the economy, and government (Podesta et al., 2014).
Big Data is made possible through the process of datafication, which refers to putting phenomena “in a quantified format so it can be tabulated and analyzed” (Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013, p. 77). This allows people and organizations to collect vast quantities of data that often are seemingly unrelated, through the use of algorithms. More specifically, these data sets are “large, diverse, complex, longitudinal, and/or distributed data sets generated from instruments, sensors, internet transactions, e-mail, video, click streams, and/or all other digital sources available today and in the future” (NSF, 2012).
The important detail here is that all this data are available digitally and thus available on the:
“Internet of Things” […] a term used to describe the ability of devices to communicate with each other using embedded sensors that are linked through wired and wireless networks. These devices could include your car, or a pill you swallow so the doctor can monitor the health of your digestive tract. These connected devices use the Internet to transmit, compile, and analyze data (Podesta et al., 2014, p. 2).
Technological innovations, particularly in terms of capturing, aggregating, and processing vast and diverse volumes of data at greater speed, make Big Data possible.
While many of these data sources will serve society and governments well in terms of managing infrastructure, monitoring diseases and public health, and even collecting more tax, they also pose serious threats to citizens. Privacy is at the core of these concerns. In the US the Fair Information Practices Principles form the basis of privacy laws (Podesta et al., 2014). Similar laws were adopted in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Council of Europe and member countries of the Organization for Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation. Increasingly countries supporting privacy laws are coordinating efforts to “clarify obligations for companies and help build interoperability between global privacy frameworks” (p. 21), which shows...