Blog 14: Drowning in data.

The thing that I would like to discuss is about chapter 3. Chapter 3’s big takeaway was data. I do not think it is possible to comprehend the amount of data that is out there. The data that has been collected has been used for good and bad things. People have become so obsessed with data that it has become a currency. Companies want to know what you are buying and they want to predict what you will buy in the future. I wonder if this is for their benefit or if they are trying to assist their customers. The scariest thing to me was how some of these apps can locate you at anytime. This is the kind of data that is bad in my opinion. This is an infringement on privacy to be able to see where someone is anytime of the day.

There were some good applications of data collection though. One they talked about was weather and how to predict it as accurately as possible. Another good one that this chapter talked about was computers analyzing past areas of a city where crime has happened and predicting where it is going to happen next. I do think that this is technology that we should look into but something we need to be cautious using. Going forward, I think we need to be careful about what data we are collecting. I think that there needs to be more transparency on what companies can see and collect from you. Maybe in the future we will have a government agency that will be able to govern this type of collection.

Questions:

Do you think it is a bad idea to be able to predict where crime may take place in the future? Implications of this?

Do you think that companies are collecting too much data from people? Is our privacy being infringed on?

Picture taken from: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Too-much-data-300x150.png

Greengard, Samuel. The internet of things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Chapter 3]