Big Data = Big Brother

By Gerald McGrew on March 28, 2013 in Other

Every single minute of every day a lot happens on the Internet. When I say a lot, I actually mean a mind-bendingly large amount.

Consider this: each minute over 200 million emails are sent, YouTube has 48 hours of mostly boring video uploaded, Google receives over 2 million search requests (probably split evenly between queries for porn and/or pictures of Beyonce), Facebook users share 684,000 pieces of overwhelmingly pointless content, Instagram users share 3600 photos of their breakfast and Twitter blasts out 150,000 inane messages. Then think about how many websites, blogs and apps are created or updated each minute, and then multiply all this activity by 1440 to calculate 24 hours of online shenanigans. And every single activity is being stored as data, in the form of what was done, who did it, and where and how it happened.

IBM estimates the world is generating 2.5 billion gigabytes of data every day, equivalent to 125 years of DVD-quality video. In fact, 90% of the world’s total data – in other words, everything ever recorded in the history of mankind – has been created in just the last two years. This is what they term ‘Big Data’, which is an understatement comparable to ‘Mundine is a dickhead’.

However, that’s enough nerding out for now. The numbers are staggering, sure, but what do they mean to the average person? It means plenty, and it’s going to change your life. Due to the open nature of the Internet, and in particular social networks, information on just about everything you do online can be purchased by marketers and advertisers. This probably isn’t a surprise to many of you. We’ve all experienced online advertising re-targeting, where you visit a website for a particular product and then banner ads for that product appear on websites you visit afterwards – slightly creepy, but mostly harmless.

Yet recent advances in the way that large data sets are interpreted have changed the game. Hadoop clusters, MapReduce and multilinear subspace learning are all highly dorky technologies that are being used by the ad game to understand what you want, when you want it, and the precise message you need to make you buy it. There’s even talk about Big Data letting advertisers know what you want before you do. While this is an excellent quality in a barman, it’s far scarier when you start to see haemorrhoid treatment ads on every website you visit.

Another data-driven development in the dirty art of online advertising is the ability to connect what you do on your home and work computer with what you do on your mobile phone. It’s one thing for an advertiser to know your laptop surfing secrets, and another altogether when they use that same knowledge via your GPS-enabled mobile. Now the race is on to have your ‘buyer profile’ synch up with screens in stores and shopping centres.

Knowing where (and when) you are is the Holy Grail for advertisers; it means they don’t have to annoyingly spray online ads in your general direction. Instead, the new breed of advertisers will be able to target you accurately in the ‘real world’. They’ll be just like a very clever stalker who isn’t interested in killing you, but simply wants you to buy Colgate instead of Macleans!