What is that you say, BI causing privacy issues? No way! Way!
With the advent and wide spread use of social network systems such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and many others, much of the information that was normally keep to ourselves is now available through an API. It did not take long for those in the BI community to figure out how to mine Twitter for information that may have some business value. Such as the sales of a particular product that's directly related to the number of times it's mentioned on Twitter.
However, beyond the business applications that social networking data clearly has, with the availability of lots of very different personal information scattered throughout many social networking systems, there are those that have figured out how to create profiles of social networking users more complete, and detailed, than those users might imagine, including name, address, phone, personal e-mail, sexual orientation, health status, occupation, employers information, and a log of your movements and communications since you've been typing them in the social networking sites, or perhaps being automatically reported through the GPS in your phone.
Keep in mind that they are really not accessing information you did not choose to make available, however, social networking users are really not aware of how this information can be brought together and mined using the latest BI technology. It's actually a great demonstration of the power of BI.
Web sites are actually popping up now that have the ability to abstract some personal information across social networking sites. While not widely known today, could clearly cause some privacy concerns as more social networking users learn about their existence.
Even more of a concern, is the BI systems that you'll never see. Housed within corporation that leverages this data for commercial gain. Nothing new there, other than they had to pay dearly for that data in the past, is it was much more general. Now they can find it on the Web for free, and they can drill down to the size of your pants. Scary stuff.
Dear Davis,
Not convinced.
My problems with your analysis are:
- Why single out BI? BI applications are yet not that twitter/orkut/facebook savvy. A closer culprit would be CRM.
- Information that you post about yourself in a public forum, be it linkedin, or any of the ones mentioned above, is public. If you type in your SSN into a third party website, it is no one's but your fault. Of course, many of these websites offer some security features, like a required signon or a visual captcha for identifying bots versus humans. Should these security measures not be appropriate, it reflects poorly on the website rather than the BI software.
- Websites that promote poor security standards will be discovered and trashed by the market/users. That is the most efficient mechanism of regulation discovered yet.
I think you should have written the same article from the twitter/facebook user viewpoint, rather than BI.
I cannot agree more with the article. Be it BI or CRM, the fact is that private data is out there for people to access and make commercial use of. There has to be stringent policies to protect the interest of the users.