The nuggets of the big data age

Not long ago News of the world's largest global financial information service provider Bloomberg leaked customer data on the noisy dust, the paradox is that Wall Street giants, who are the victims, don't seem to care, and the news media, who are not too busy, are targeting Bloomberg, trying to dig out something.

The best thing about this is to tell us everyone: The big Data age has come, the information is open, the data nuggets are unstoppable.

According to relevant authorities, global data volumes will grow by one fold every two years, and by 2020 the total amount of human data will be staggering 35 trillion GB. In one minute the global Internet transmits data 640,000 GB, publishes 204 million emails, and downloads 47,000 apps. The average Twitter user publishes 400 million messages a day. In the fourth quarter of 2012, Sina Weibo active daily average of 28 million, the production of micro-bo more than 100 million, the amount of data produced 1335GB ...

A universally recognized concept is that large data, or huge amounts of information, refer to the amount of data involved that is too large to pass through the current mainstream software tools to capture, manage, process and organize information within a reasonable period of time to help business decision-making more actively.

As early as last March, the U.S. government announced an investment of $200 million to launch a "Big Data research and development program" that raised large data from the commercial level to the national strategic level. It is predicted that the big data business will bring 300 billion dollars worth of U.S. health care every year, while in China, the potential market for large data is 2 trillion yuan!

A case of tsunami warning system in the United States has been widely praised, March 11, 2011, 9 minutes after the earthquake in Japan, NOAA (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) immediately through the ocean sensors to obtain real-time data issued a detailed tsunami warning, and produced a tsunami impact model. So that countries around the world on the damage caused by the tsunami.

YouTube achieved 4 billion of billions of dollars in revenue in 2012, rooted in the mining and application of large data. All the data on YouTube is based on a single video, the first visit, the first share, the first comment will be fully displayed in front of the user, but also the time and URLs are listed. It does so as long as the user wants to count and analyze, YouTube will give the data of almost all video.

Publicly available data has commercial value. Since the media age, all the behavior of people exposed to the sun, small to eat three meals a day, big to buy a house to buy a car, all the data in the network traces can follow.

There was an American man angry at Target supermarket: "You sent me to my high school daughter to mail the pregnancy product advertisement, want to encourage her to be pregnant?" "A week later the father went to the target to apologize because his daughter was pregnant." Target data analysis found: Women will buy a lot of fragrance-free hand cream, multidimensional elements and calcium tablets, the index, target can accurately predict the pregnancy of female customers, and began to mail ads.

Alipay [Weibo] The latest data show that over the past year, more than 55% of college students in the country have joined the army of Taobao [microblog] payments. Data show that the online consumption of the most powerful college students, not north of a wide range of first-tier cities, the number one is Zhejiang University. The data science team used large data to identify college students, and showed that girls shop for clothes, boys love digital, and 60% use mobile phones for shopping. Through data mining, it will allow countless Taobao sellers to benefit.

At Wal-Mart in the United States, a particularly interesting phenomenon has been found: diapers and beer are two unrelated commodities, and this strange move has led to a sharp increase in diapers and beer sales. It turns out that women in the United States usually take care of their children at home, so they often charge their husbands to buy diapers for their children on their way home from work, while the husband buys the diapers and buys the beer he likes. The discovery brought a lot of profits to the business.

All this is the credit of big data.

Privacy data corresponds to publicly available data. But what is the privacy data, and does not have a strict standard of judgment, for example, for ordinary people, shelter and so on are personal privacy, without permission, can not be exposed, businesses can not use this profit. Bloomberg's behavior was exposed by the media because it violated the privacy of its clients.

But for public figures, there is no privacy.

United States law stipulates that the state of personal property should be disclosed to the public before the President and the General Staff of the Government. This is a law that no one can override, and those who do not disclose property cannot enter the government to master the public good. So, every four years, the new cabinet nomination is the busiest time for the U.S. government's ethics office, and all candidates nominated by the President and required to be approved by the Senate must submit property reporting to the federal government's ethics office.

In 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama's family wealth was between 1.8 million dollars and nearly 7 million trillion, compared with a small contraction in 2010 and 2011, according to the White House's newly released data. In stark contrast, the United States ordinary people's personal property data is strictly protected, without permission, unauthorized publication, will be prosecuted.

Barack Obama, a two-time president of the White House as a web-fan marketer, has pushed the US Public Information Act to build an "ever transparent government". On the White House website, you can even find out which of the guests President Obama has privately entertained this month.

What China lacks right now is the protection of data privacy for ordinary citizens: you have just bought a house, and the information you buy will be sold to the decoration company. But the government's public information has done nothing.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)