The moral hazard behind big data

700,000 of people, no one told online experiments, the world's largest social network Facebook's secret emotional test recently exposed the world, the industry in an uproar. While Facebook's second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg the first time to apologize, the deep investigation into the British government's involvement has again put the red line between big data and personal privacy on the stage. The current "Big data" so hot industry concept, in the face of the application of the standard gray area, how?

2012, Facebook's behind-the-scenes experiment was designed to measure the emotional response and behavioral guidance of 700,000 of users in the face of newsfeed. Facebook, in particular, sets some positive or negative emotional keywords on the page and controls what users read in their news feeds to see how users behave in their own post. After about a week of data collection, Facebook data analysts can observe the emotional response of users to social networks. Facebook's behavior has undoubtedly been strongly charged with the manipulation of 700,000 of users ' emotions.

Although large internet companies have the absolute advantage of "big data", many data analysis reports are no secret. Google has publicly stated that it conducts more than 20,000 different data experiments a year, even including the famous "different shades of Blue" test, which distinguishes between color and user interaction on the Web page. Facebook has also published a number of important reports on data analysis in the past few years, such as 2012, when Facebook's data science team analyzed 25 million of users, and its data reports responded forcefully to the "filter bubbles" theory that prevailed. To some extent to eliminate the spread of the theory of the current news and search results of excessive filtering filtering, users will be immersed in the "filter bubble", can not be challenged or expand the world view of the information, such as a series of worries.

"Big Data" era, in the choice of the application of the Internet and other High-tech at the beginning of the moment, the user consciously unconscious of the situation has been a large part of personal information in the "broad daylight" under. Every time you face a website/application, you need to fill in the mailbox, password and other information, as well as the need to read a long list of user agreements, about the privacy of that small block of text, even if the intention to protect themselves, but also difficult to weigh. Whether it is google,facebook,amazon or the domestic bat trio, the explosive growth of information, from "Sharing (sharing)" to "Personality (personalization)" Trend presents, The data available to internet companies basically cover a large part of most people's lives. In the past, the development of the Internet, more attention is how to use the Internet platform to collect more data, and development so far, in the face of the massive information already collected, how to use the data itself, not only become a business model of judgment, but also a social moral judgments, Even in a sense to become the corresponding industry and even legal norms.

Facebook's exposure to the behind-the-scenes experiment is a cautionary statement. The trade-off between users, internet companies, and governments is a process that is immediately and permanently working together. In the context of personal privacy and moral constraints, the "Big Data" era is not an era of data abuse, but an era in which data needs to be well utilized.