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Welcome back to Geek Time. This is the advanced episode about Big Data. Hello, Lulu.

Hi Brad.

We're gonna start off by talking about the… some of the benefits of big data.

I mean, the benefits are pretty obvious, right？Because last time you were talking about the three Vs, the Volume, Variety, Velocity, so it's just basically the ability to be able to process huge amount of data that before it used to probably take people years to process.

Now it can be done in a matter of days or even hours or seconds.

Exactly. And it's not just yet looking at the amount of data, but we're looking at greater geographical areas just like I mentioned with like talking about the weather, but not just with whether, we can look at more like health related issues, it can be a lot of different things; but we can connect variables that typically wouldn't be found when we're looking at things may be related to our health.

And like a doctor, when you go in to see the doctor, he's gonna ask you certain questions. They can start making some correlations based on how you answer those questions.

But with big data, they can actually look at larger groups of people who have health conditions. And based on those health conditions, they might be able to find like a better reason why people have these particular health conditions.

So one possible case jumps to mind is, for example, if people from certain area, certain sort of geographical background, or let's say, other type of background, they have similar backgrounds and they all develop similar symptoms. The doctor might not know, but the big data would help the doctor to find or to build that connection.

Yes, so like they can look for those things much easier. It's not just like one doctor looking for everything, it's several doctors putting out their information and then looking at that data and finding out a more reliable cause for something.

And it's also just about everyone is able to access a lot more data than in the past in the age of big data.

When we look at the data that people have access to, we start to look at some of the difficulties, gets really hard to really randomize the data.

In the past, people would just go out and they would collect data from, you know, random people. They wouldn't collect their name or anything. But nowadays, when like companies are collecting data, there's all this information attached to one particular person. It's hard to really randomize that when you have like all these particular sets related to one person.

Does that mean that, for example, when they collect data from you, they say this is a random person and then… but because they collect your age, they collect your, for example, nationality, and then your geographical occasion, and eventually they will make up a pretty good picture, pretty precise picture of who you are.

So it's not really random, it's not really随机 anyways, it's a specific person.

They have all these data points. And so unless they strip away several of those data points, it's really hard to randomize whose data is what？It's something…

When we look at that amount of data, one of the other issues that comes is like we're looking at a lot of data overload. When someone's doing research, they're gonna look at specific sets of data, but because they have all this extra data, they're going to start just including that extra data, just because they have it at their hands.

When they start doing that, they start looking and finding correlations that aren't really there.

I see. So they start to read too much into the data just because they have it.

There is this data and it's kind of unclear if there's a correlation to it at all.

So for example, everyone who loves Hello Kitty seems to be developing a cough. And you are like… then you draw like a false causal link saying that people who likes Hello Kitty is likely to have like lung disease. But that might just be data overload, like you said.

Maybe that the latest Hello Kitty toys have some sort of chemical or something that's causing people to get sick; or could just be that coincidence. Everyone likes Hello Kitty and when they look at everyone, they find out all these people like Hello Kitty, but they're also getting sick.

But then we look at…you know everyone likes Hello Kitty.

Honestly, it's very easy for people to use this data overload to sort of …to cherry pick the evidence if they try to argue for or against something, because there's so much data. You can easily going to data overload and just cherry pick the ones that are good for your arguments.

Right. It's really hard to kind of separate things and that comes into a lot of security issues like when you're looking at like data anonymity. Yeah. A lot of companies are claiming that their data is anonymized. And so when they're looking at the data, people can actually say sure there we don't have a name for this person, but then they can look at all the data that they have, and they can determine with a great reliability who that person actually is.

And so it gets a little bit scary because the data that they have, they know exactly who that person is.

Yeah. For example, if they collected my data, they know my age, they know where my hometown is. Let's say they know where I work, they know where I live. And then when you try to narrow me down, then it's very easy to narrow it down.

With each data entry, you get a clear picture of who this person is. You can say that you don't reveal my name, I remain anonymous, but then actually you are revealing my name without revealing it, that sort of idea, yeah.

What even gets into more difficult aspects is the GPS data that's often collected. When you take a picture with your camera, it collects GPS data.

You have your phone, whenever you take your phone somewhere, it's collecting GPS data. And a lot of apps, they actually use that GPS data. And so when companies are collecting the data, they know exactly where you go in the morning and then where you're returning to in the evening.

So they have a great reliability of knowing where exactly you live, where exactly you work, who you're living with. If you have kids, what school do they go to？

We're essentially running around naked online because big data knows everything about us. No matter… I guess the only way to really remain completely anonymous in the age of data is to stay radio silence, is basically you have to take yourself off the internet, take yourself off the smartphone, not using any apps, not using any of these… which is impossible.

For most people this is impossible. Think about Covid days, if you need to scan the code, people know who you are, where you are, your entire life history, your tracks, everything. Right？

That is really scary if you think about it. It is okay if your personal data is being collected for a specific purpose, for example, let's say for a pandemic prevention. But what if it's then used on something else？And then that is the part that I think a lot of people are worried about.

And just as a reminder to those of you who are listening, what Brad was just saying, every time you take a photo, you send it to someone, you posted on your social media, for people who are like Brad, they can easily get your GPS information, right？

Like it's not just looking at the picture and using information in the picture to find out where you live. It's actually in the metadata.

So when you take a picture with your camera, that the metadata of the file actually carries GPS coordinates of where things are. When I was taking some cyber security courses at Uni (university), we learned how to find that data in the metadata. Anyone could find it.

But you can't technically raise it or hide it.

You can strip it.

I see.

But most people don't worry about that. Most people don't even think about it. Most people don't even know it's there. But like the people that are getting a little bit more like involved in their data, are starting to leave or avoid companies that collect data.

So they're not going on YouTube. They're not going on Facebook. Or if they do, they're using like special browsers that might avoid like leaving cookies and things like that. But like another thing that's kind of scary is in some countries, insurance company is using these data points to like increase your health care costs like…

Wow.

If you live in a particular area, you might be more likely to get a particular disease. So therefore your health care costs should go up. It hasn't really come to this yet, but this is something you see in movies like there's a movie called The Minority Report. It's actually from a book, but they're using information to punish people for crimes that they haven't committed, but they think they will commit.

And so like something we did mention that.

But that is a very dystopic sort of idea if we ever come to that and people get punished for crimes they may or may not commit, but they are probably going to commit. That would be very much dystopia.

Kind of scary.

I would say really scary. But even if we're not talking about that level scary, even if we're just talking about the rampant consumerism, because honestly, as a consumer, I feel like they have profiled me so much.

Now big data knows so much about me. It knows more about me than my close friends, than my mom. For example, they probably know that I’m likely to go to bed at 12o'clock. Then before I fall asleep, I will browse some online shopping sites and I have this particular weakness of buying random things right around that time.

I now suspect that they're trying to push some random things to me, for me to buy before I go to bed.

That's a possibility you know like they can target you. And if they know exactly what you want and know exactly when you're going to buy it, they can make sure that you are looking at that particular thing. They'll make sure it shows up in your…in your feed.

They're targeting my weakness. I don't care for that.

All right, I think on that note, we're gonna wrap up the nightmare of big data. I say that, but the big data obviously like many things, many technological advancement, it has a lot of good uses, but then again, there are also a lot of things to watch out for.

So share with us in the comment section what you feel, what you know about big data, and then do you feel like you have been targeted？Thank you, Brad, for coming to the show.

No problem.

See you next time.

I'll see you again next time.