Question

Discuss the personal and professional implications of so much individual data being gathered, stored, and sold. Should businesses be allowed to gather as much as they want? Should individuals have more control over their data that are gathered?

Answer 1

Answer-

As the population increases, the need to store their information also increases. Storing any information requires disk storage/memory allocation. Example - We may require to store an indiviaduals Name, address, phone number, and profile photos etc. We have various ways of doing it. We can store it in notebook or in electronic format. Below are the implications of storing this information-

Personal implications - When we share a lot of personal data to different websites in electronic format(say publishing personal email id , profile picture), this can lead to a threat called as 'Data theft' or Data stealing. In simple terms the information which was shared by us to a given website is sold out to third party website for some monetary benefit. This can lead to a risk of our information being used for some offensive purposes like defamation etc. This huge data if accumulated for years and years can become very difficult to manage. Information retrival can be very tedious as the data volume increases.

Professional Implications - As the number of folders and files in office laptop/machines increases, this can lead to two major problems-

1. Storage issues - The number of disks that store data needs to be added on frequent basis in order to accomodate the increasing customer data.

2. Information retrival - Gathering information from data or knowledge mining can get difficult as data volume increases. This can be resolved by using knowledge mining tools.

Business should be allowed to gather the data that they want unless they have a well defined 'Terms and Conditions' before allowing user to 'sign up' to their website and as long as they collect information for meaningful and fruitful purposes. Businesses can use some of the sophisticated technologies like Big Data and Hadoop to store and manage high volume of data.

Users should have full access to the contents that they share will the website/apps etc. Anytime, they can revoke read access from any of their contents available in internet.