Target was right, the girl was indeed so many weeks pregnant, but a major discussion started in the press about how much organizations know about us and how they use their big data knowledge to sell us as much as possible.
Fair Information Practice Principles
Well-targeted and right on target is nice, but what is known about us and how it is used, we are not always told. This kind of transparency has been a crucial part of the so-called Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPs, Data Protection Principles in Europe) for decades, but it is still sometimes ignored.
What information is involved and where does it come from?
Some may find the Target example easy to understand, but what if your loan, mortgage or insurance application is rejected because the data shows that your financial situation or your health poses an unacceptable risk to the lender? What information is involved? Where does it come from? How was it collected? Can you see the data yourself? Can you change it?
Such simple and fundamental questions have been a thorny issue for decades in the age of digital information. list to data Books have been written about the sometimes Kafkaesque examples of people whose situation was wrongly put in a bad light, and there is a lot of case law.
big data
Better prediction and selection is generally the big gain that can be achieved with big data . For organizations, the opportunities are there for the taking: fraud detection, more efficient energy supply, customized offers, anticipating epidemics, and so on. In the article Web privacy becomes a business imperative , on the website of the New York Times, Professor Reidenberg of Fordham Law School states that: