The argument becomes more and more contentious between customers actively aggregating data profile and being passively collected personal information. The Target’s case put this issue in a more controversial and extreme situation. Since Target’s effort to speculate women’s pregnancy reached a very deep level of personal privacy that most people wouldn’t feel comfortable being asked about by strangers. However, on the other side, while Target is trying to make profit and solicit customers, it is also bring much convenience and promotions to the targeted women customers. Just as many other e-service-based companies like Netflix and Google are doing, most of advertisements or movie recommendations are the result of Big Data analysis. In most cases, we all benefit from the service brought by Big Data technology.
What can also be a backfire other than privacy violation? As I have talked about in the data critique, the minority population might be neglected through the process of Big Data analysis. Every 5 years, American Census Bureau collects data from various aspects like family, work, and education. With the database, the bureau tries to make estimates which can apply to the entire population. However, from the estimates, we can easily recognize the minority groups from the majority. Thus, it is more likely the private companies would design their products for the majority based on the estimates. Is Big Data hurting the minority groups? What should we do to improve? Perhaps we can predict that in the future, Big Data is able to provide the basis for a perfect market which hurts no minorities.
Picture from: Singh, Tarry “Big Data Is The Future Of Digital Marketing” WordPress. July 26th 2014. Web. Feb. 17th 2015. (http://tarrysingh.com/2014/07/big-data-is-the-future-of-digital-marketing/ )