http://www.cio.com/article/2977027/intel-reveals-big-datas-dirty-little-secret.html
The article is entitled "Intel reveals big data's dirty little secret" but I read it a little bit differently.
From the article: "Companies are spending billions on tools and engineering to analyse big data, though many are hampered by one little problem: they still don't know what to do with all the data they collect."
This means that, of all the egregious breaches of personal privacy that companies regularly perform (the Target-knows-you're-pregnant-when-your-parents-don't story comes to mind), they have still only scratched the surface of making sense of your information, and using it effectively. Which means that, as Big Data gets people who actually know what they're doing, the more frightening the possibilities become, which is probably only a matter of time.
How would you feel about getting a bunch of targeted spam from divorce lawyers because your wife/husband's personal details were in the big Ashley Madison data leak, before you even heard about it? What if you were the guy who got drunk and put a profile up one time after a big fight but never followed up on it? This is why I don't have a Facebook account.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Francis on Saturday August 29 2015, @04:04PM
It's not just that, imagine what would have happened if the Nazis had had access to this amount of data. It's not likely that something of that scale will happen again, but since then there's been Rwanda and Bosnia amongst others. Not to mention the various authoritarian regimes out there right now.
Even if you don't live in an authoritarian regime, you can still have your life ruined if the information gets released or your information is similar to somebody else. I wonder how many people are being caught up in the AM scandal that weren't actually using the service.