“With great power comes great responsibility.”  – Voltaire

“Big Brother is watching you.” – George Orwell 

This recent piece by Simon Dumenco from the Data Issue of Ad Age is a witty commentary on Big Data. He describes not only what it can do, and its public perception, but he points out that as we build “bigger data haystacks” it becomes even harder to find the “needle.”

While there is such an abundance of data, much of it is so disparate or silo-ed that it’s practically useless.  So if consumers really knew this reality that we data people know, they would not worry as much about Big Brother.

He refers to many Big Data themed stories in the media today a being “both vaguely scary and rather misleading. Misleading because big data rarely works so well. Generally, it’s pretty much Too Much Data and/or Useless Data and/or Inaccessible Data and/or Nobody Knows Quite What To Do With It Data and/or … you get the idea.”

Enjoy…

http://adage.com/article/dataworks/brutal-truth-big-data/240364/