On Dec 26, 2012, at 1:30 PM, [email protected] wrote: > > > I'd say that Bob is right: user information which can then be sold or used. I > would even say that if Instagram doesn't compile, sell or otherwise use > customer information that the fact that you have registered is to their > benefit. "We have over 100,000,000 users worldwide with 10,000 a day signing > up!", will attract advertisers, investors, buyers. They benefit from your > mere presence.
That last sentence is the key point in this era of Big Data---**we** are the commodity!!!! The book entitled *The Human Face of Big Data*, a monster of a coffee table book, might be of interest to some on the list. Done by Rick Smolan and Jeffifer Erwitt--the two that do the *Day in the Life* books--this book is comprised of photo essays with titles like "Our Data, Ourselves", "Dark Data", "Reflections in a Digital Mirror", "A Demograph of One", "The Art of Data" (check out p. 190--an amazing graph that shows cross-referenced items in the Bible), "Data Driven" etc. I find the book both interesting and quite frightening. The photography and infographics are good, and the essays are well written, though some of the claims and arguments make one pause with concern--well, me at least, maybe others have less concern. I'm really glad I purchased the book and recommend it to others given the direction humanity is headed with respect to Big Data--though I think it's more accurate to say it's not so much a matter of a direction, or destination we're headed in or to-- rather it's a journey we've already started, and we had better be smart, compassionate, and vigilant about the rest of the trip. Cheers, Christine -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
