Corporations data on Americans is expanding into people's personal habits etc.
As real-time and batch analytics evolve using big data processing engines such as Hadoop, corporations will be able to track our activities, habits and locations with greater precision than ever thought.
"It will change our existing notions of privacy. A surveillance society is not only inevitable, it's worse. It's irresistible," said Jeff Jonas, a distinguished engineer with IBM. Jonas spoke to a packed house of several hundred people Wednesday at the Structure Big Data 2011 conference here.
For businesses, knowing where people are by using geo-locational data will help them personalize advertising and marketing materials over the Web. For example, if a company knows a customer is in Aruba, it won't bother offering him or her advertising for restaurants in New York, but instead it may market sun-tanning lotion or scuba-diving excursions.
Knowing where people are will also determine with accuracy which potential customer is which. For example, if there are five people living in the U.S. with the same name and the same date of birth, but live in different cities, knowing their locations at a given time verifies their identities.
Other companies are using big data analytics to track the use of content on their Web sites in order to better tailor it to users' tastes.
Sondra Russell, a metrics analyst with National Public Radio, said she needed a way to track Web site audience use trends in near real time. NPR offers podcasts, live streams, on-demand streams and other radio content on its Web site. Her organization had been using Web analytics engine Omniture, but it felt like she was trying to jam log-based data into a client-side tracking system that couldn't handle the volume.
Russell said NPR experienced query delays that at best were six to 12 hours long and at worst, weeks long. The organization finally switched to Splunk's reporting tool, which crawls logs, metrics and other application, server and network data and indexes it in a searchable repository.
"I just want to know how many times someone listened to a program during a certain period of time," she said. "With Splunk I had no delays between data appearing in a query folder and data appearing in reports. I can get any number of graphs without weeks of prep time."
Link:
http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=1A7AAB63-1A64-6A71-CEB3FEE2FB6B5E04