[telecom] Mystery of Big Data's Parallel Universe Brings Fear, and a Thrill

Mystery of Big Data's Parallel Universe Brings Fear, and a Thrill

By DENNIS OVERBYE June 4, 2012

Not long ago, a woman in Tacoma, Wash., received a suggestion from Facebook that she "friend" another woman. She didn't know the other woman, but she followed through, as many of us have, innocently laying our cookie-crumb trails through cyberspace, only to get a surprise.

On the other woman's profile page was a wedding picture - of her and the first woman's husband, now exposed for all the cyberworld to see as a bigamist.

And so it goes in the era of what is called Big Data, in which more and more information about our lives - where we shop and what we buy, indeed where we are right now - the economy, the genomes of countless organisms we can't even name yet, galaxies full of stars we haven't counted, traffic jams in Singapore and the weather on Mars tumbles faster and faster through bigger and bigger computers down to everybody's fingertips, which are holding devices with more processing power than the Apollo mission control. Big Data probably knows more about us than we ourselves do, but is there stuff that Big Data itself doesn't know it knows? Big Data is watching us, but who or what is watching Big Data?

It is perhaps time to be afraid. Very afraid, suggests the science historian George Dyson, author of a recent biography of John von Neumann, one of the inventors of the digital computer. In "A Universe of Self-Replicating Code," a conversation published on the Web site Edge, Mr. Dyson says that the world's bank of digital information, growing at a rate of roughly five trillion bits a second, constitutes a parallel universe of numbers and codes and viruses with its own "physics" and "biology."

There are things going on inside that universe that we don't know about, he points out - except when it produces unpleasant surprises, as it did during the "flash crash" of the stock market in May 2010. And we had better find out what they are.

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Reply to
Monty Solomon
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There are two ways to look at "Big Data": as a change agent that will improve our lives, or as an Orwellian "Big Brother" menace that threatens to turn us all into pod people or oppressed, frightened clerks waiting for the Telescreen to order us to face the music and proceed MinLove-wise.

I'm bothered that the press seems to be determined to paint any use of such information as an evil event. The coverage of this, and most technical issues, is, IMNSHO, intended to induce fear and make the public want to buy the paper, or watch the TV commercials, instead of informing us about *BOTH* the positive and negative /possibilities/ of large databases and the information in them.

Reply to
Bill Horne

Unfortunately, I don't think the general public or the press realize how much personal data about us is stored on computers. That data exists in places we know nothing about nor have any control to protect it from abuse or error.

There have been numerous news reports of serious leaks, the latest being LinkedIn. The people who control these critical respositories are human, and they make mistakes that allow hacking or deliberately release data.

Reply to
HAncock4

News consists of something out of the ordinary. Reporting what is normal might be used in a feature story of a manual, but it is not news.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Reply to
Wes Leatherock

(The Wall Street Journal's "What They Know" page has a gaggle of articles about privacy, or more accurately, the lack of it, in cellular users' online worlds. - Moderator)

The Wall Street Journal

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Reply to
Monty Solomon

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