After watching âThe Legal Side of Big Data,â Iâve learned about some issues I was unaware of. Businesses specifically need to be aware of how likely it is for their âbig dataâ to be hacked, or compromised. Of course it is important for businesses to try to ensure that they wonât be hacked, however, it happens more often than we think and it happens to companies we wouldnât expect, such as Target and Home Depot. Following this, it is especially important for businesses to have a plan for what to do if they were to get hacked. Businesses have to address a poor risk assessment, and determine things such as how likely is the hack to happen, what would it cost, how would it hurt your company and consumers, and how that would affect your company on a competitive aspect. It is important for companies to be ahead of the problem, and spend money to prepare in case of a hack.
As consumers, itâs important to know that there is nothing we can really do to prevent this from happening. It was insane to me to read and hear about big data being sieged within big companies, such as Target, Neiman Marcus and Home Depot. The Target example shocked me, that there were 740 million data records exposed in 2013, because I shop at Target almost weekly. It is also important for consumers to know that there is a possibility that companies are not being reliable with what they are using their data for.
The best way to balance the opportunities and threats presented by the development of big data is to get ahead of the problem. It is possible to spend more money to ensure that your data is as safe as it can be, and it is stored correctly. If a hack were to occur, it would probably cost just as much money to fix as it would to ensure safety before the problem arises.
After reading âThe Internetâs Original Sin,â and watching Maciej Ceglowskiâs talk, I can confirm that the Internet business model wasnât âsupposedâ to be used to influence and normalize surveillance. I really liked Ceglowskiâs example about cars. He was discussing how cars were a great idea, however, now the entire countryâs landscaping is built around the idea of cars. He said, âNow that everyone has a car, everyone needs a car.â which is true about the Internet too. The Internet used to be a source of freedom, and now, everyoneâs on it. This can relate to the article, when it states, âThe model that we acquired was analyzing userâs personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiserâs toolkit: the pop-up ad.â (The Internetâs Original Sin). The quote continues by stating, âI wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. Iâm sorry. Our intentions were good.â (The Internetâs Original Sin). What I got from both the talk and the article, is that this surveillance and data gathering and hacking was not expected, and was not supposed to be what came from the Internet. The creators of the Internet had good intentions, likewise the inventors of the car had great intentions. Both came with negative outcomes (accidentally). Now that we are here though with advertisements generating so much money for companies, there really is no going back to an Internet without surveillance. The article mentions that âthe primary benefit of online advertising is the ability to see whoâs looking at an ad. Simply paying for online advertising requires surveillance, if only to eliminate click fraud.â (The Internetâs Original Sin). When companies know who is looking at an advertisement, it is put into the algorithms and the people who looked at the ad longest will receive more ads based on that ad, and those who immediately clicked away from it will keep receiving different advertisements until there is one they look at for a long time. This is how companies can determine our likes and dislikes, and work us into the algorithms.
Ceglowski, M. (2021, November 23). Maciej Ceglowski â the internet with a human face â beyond tellerrand dĂźsseldorf 2014. Vimeo. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https://vimeo.com/102717446.
Zuckerman, E. (2018, June 20). The internetâs original sin. The Atlantic. Retrieved November 23, 2021, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/.Â