Trust & Forgiveness in a Big Data World

Big 3 Credit Reporting Agencies
What does your credit report say about you? When’s the last time you looked at that credit report to check what it does say?

Trust & Forgiveness

Credit history is one example of trust and forgiveness with personal information that pre-dates Big Data. We trust the credit agencies and system to report us accurately … but do they always?   When we have accidents or incidents, do we not want some promise of forgiveness?

Forgiveness

What about the FB post or Tweet we wish we hadn’t sent? Like in a job interview or a pick up line at a bar, we all have things we wish we hadn’t said, but in a Big Data world, every social media post is captured for infinity.  (or is it? Can it be “erased?”)  Social media is also only a puff of your data exhaust as well.  Aren’t we entitled to make a mistake without it being digitally set in stone?  The answer isn’t so simple.

Created to evaporate after a few seconds ... but does it???
Created to evaporate after a few seconds … but does it???

Trust

What about “private” information for the “public” good? The position information on my cell phone as I drive helps the public – and myself – with collective, instantaneous feedback on traffic. But how else is that data used and am I good with it being “held” indefinitely?

Local Traffic

It’s a shady grey scale:  embarrassing drunk FB post,  borderline unlawful and inappropriate public official actions, the intermediate steps of a violent criminal.

Who has the say for what is public and what is private? How much trust is enough or too much? What are the forgiveness rules?

Experts Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media) and Doug Cutting (Hadoop creator & Cloudera chief architect) give a brief overview of these delicate subjects, their effects and the challenges society faces with Big Data privacy.