Discussion on:

Is 'Big Data' good or evil? New survey exposes growing debate

It's being gathered without properly informed voluntary consent (yah, I know it's redundant, but I'm emphasizing here).

Then it's being kept for longer than the owner would have ever wanted...

And it's being abused for purposes to which the owner would never have consented... if she had had the chance to specify her terms and conditions.

And it's being abused, being put to nefarious purposes beyond merely purposes the owner would not have readily agreed to.

It's surprising that elites would be so concerned about the problems that big data causes - especially when the reasons for concern are relatively unformed. "Engendering false confidence in our predictive powers" does not really seem like much of a concern when we are placing "small bets fast."

If the bets are small, we can course correct quickly - no reason to feel overconfident about our predictive powers - they will be easy to judge on their efficacy.

A bigger challenge is what to do about Black Swan events. This is already a problem for the financial industry, with 70% of trades performed by algorithms. All of the big data modeling goes in to determining what other algorithms are doing, which means that when something genuinely out of the ordinary happens, the whole system breaks down. The Flash Crash is a perfect example of this.

So, how to ensure this does not happen? At Janrain, as we see more customers storing social profile data, the question of what to do with it focuses more on how to keep humans, with the ability to interpret and judge, in the decision-making process where they can provide the most value. This will not change - in fact, the need for more and deeper understanding will be the biggest challenge of dealing with big data.

"Big" is just a kind of volume.