Privacy and Big Data

Abstract

Issues related to privacy and Big Data came to broader academic scrutiny and greater public attention with Edward Snowden's revelations regarding {NSA}'s Big Data surveillance programs and methods. A large number of academic conferences, government summits and probing legal, social and engineering studies have now tackled the subject of Big Data surveillance and its impact on people's private lives. This chapter provides an overview of the concepts of privacy and Big Data. It begins with a review of the benefits and limitations of Big Data analysis techniques including some of the purely mathematical challenges such as the curse of dimensionality. It next reviews the more modern understanding of the concept of privacy, discussing various legal and ethical issues including those particular to Big Data systems. A general overview follows regarding the current privacy protection techniques and the challenges we face. The analysis of the modern conceptual understanding of privacy proves that much of the ancient and classical conceptualization of privacy and the taboos against eavesdropping, as discussed in the introduction, have survived into the current age but at a much more complicated manner. While researchers have articulated conceptual details that pay due attention to the impact of privacy violation on freedom and human beings' personality development across the board, the broader ethical understanding seems to be fading away as privacy policies become harder to track and understand. Furthermore, privacy protection techniques are still in their infancy. While they have some applications in enterprise and health care, the challenges posed to privacy by Big Data surveillance capabilities can only best be met by architectural shifts such as trusted cloud architectures which will have direct business and other implications. Proposals for privacy-protecting architectures of the future are currently in early development by various researchers and technologists who share an interest in protecting what gives us our personalities and differences—our privacy. Most of these techniques point towards attempts to turn the Big Data cloud into storage machines for encrypted data.