Big data: prospects and challenges

Abstract

Pulak Ghosh and Janakiraman Moorthy discuss the customer privacy issues with the emergence of Big Data phenomenon. Given the nature of Big Data, information collected are likely to be in the memory for a much longer time than what it used to be earlier; novel and innovative means for combining and ‘sense making’ are likely to be deployed more and more; and a variety of structured and unstructured data would be combined. All such dramatic changes are likely to provide more powerful ammunition in the hands of business analysts and data scientists, and customers are likely to experience more invasion. New ways of handling such emerging privacy issues need to be developed. Consumer privacy, collection of personal data, analysis and utilization are long standing concerns of marketers. These concerns form an integral part of the technologies that have a growing influence on the society. More than a century ago, Warren and Brandeis, legal scholars in their work on potential impacts of the use of new photographic technologies on media business, made an interesting observation: ‘What is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.