Big Data: does the end of privacy? – ElEspectador.com

technology is transforming The concept of privacy as we know it today. In Tampa, the united States, a citizen, Hasan Elahi, after having been persecuted and confused on a list of FBI that associated with explosives, decided to forgo the anxiety of feeling watched and created www.trackingtransience.net a project where recorded in a map everything you do during the day.

one Might think that this is an isolated case of voluntary renunciation of privacy. But a closer look may show us how the everyday life of our digital life takes place in a similar way. Day-to-day, we solve our tastes and ideas in social networks, without having a clear idea of who, what, and how much is known from us – where are you going to stop those data?-. And in the case of generation Z – those born after 1990, the situation is even more dynamic with the use of networks such as Instagram, Kik and Snapchat.

Also, in a way voluntary, although less conscious, it could be said that the same thing happens with our records search on the internet. We are entirely open in our searches, and open to discussion, you have to wonder if with them we’re unveiling what we are and putting at risk our own privacy. As you said Beth Noveck, when she was director of the initiative open government in the Obama administration: "we are Not the passive victims that it is collecting information about us; in fact, we are active agents of this conversation."

In the news agenda national has already become common currency to suggest a few of the benefits of Big Data that, from a manufacturing perspective, to determine our patterns of behavior, to understand our emotions and help to take correct decisions, for the benefit of the business of the private sector and the design of public policy is more assertive in the State.

Equally important, however, is to open the reflection about the changes and the precautions that should be taken when data analytics to large-scale touch our privacy. In countries such as Australia has already become normal for companies to aqueduct, thanks to the Internet of Things, to know at what hours your users to take the shower. And in the united States, the chain of mass consumption Target, by using data analytics, already in the past, managed to identify the pregnancy status of a client, a young woman and to send advertising of products of motherhood, even before their parents are entereraran.

Let’s be clear: the digital world enables us to have an unlimited communication, greater transparency in the management of the State, a most democratic country in which citizens can interact more easily with the State. All factors that lead to greater productivity and economic growth. But prudence called to us not to lose sight of the counterparty. In a suggestive essay entitled Psychopolitical, the south Korean Byung-Chul Han, commenting on the changes that involves Big Data and privacy, says: "The like “is the new “amen” digital". Where to draw the thin line that separates our digital lives our right to privacy?".