John Battelle once proclaimed in his book ' The Search: How Google And Its Rivals Rewrote The Rules Of Business And Transformed Our Culture ' that the Google search engine was nothing more than a 'database of intentions'. Based on the search and click behavior of users, Google gained insight into the intentions of its users. Google Trends was the ultimate proof of this statement. For example, Google Flu Trends was able to predict where the flu would break out earlier than official agencies.
In the articleOn Small, Intimate Data, Battelle adds that it is about so-called ' small data ' . It is about small data that is meaningful to the individual. Intimate data that tells a story all its own:
“To me, small means limited, intimate, and actionable by individuals. […] It's intimate in that it's data that matters a lot to each of us, and that we share with much the same kind of social parameters that might constrain a story at an intimate dinner gathering, or a presentation at a business meeting.”
, an intelligence officer explains to the thailand mobile phone number list newspaper The Washington Post. He says the following about PRISM : “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.” This is the Holy Grail for every company. What marketer does not want to have the possibility to give the consumer the final push when the data shows that a consumer is having doubts about purchasing his product? What bank does not want to warn his customer when purchasing an article, when the data predicts that the customer will get himself into financial trouble in the near future because of the purchase? And what school does not want insight into the behavior of students in order to combat digital bullying, for example? All questions that a suitable Big Data strategy can answer.
The technology behind PRISM
PRISM is based on the open-source database Accumulo from The Apache Software Foundation. The NSA began working on it in late 2007. The product was originally called Cloudbase. Accumulo is built on the Apache Hadoop software framework, which allows applications to process petabytes of unstructured and structured data in a cloud environment on commodity hardware. It is comparable to Google's BigTable storage system.
What makes the Accumulo version of the NSA so special is that it is built with privacy in mind. Each individual piece of data can be secured at the cell level so that only an authorized user can see that information.
How does PRISM work?
Data, data and more data: we find ourselves in an expanding data universe, full of undiscovered connections. This is not abstract and general, but specific and very concrete, because every new insight can be the start of a goldmine. The NSA has managed to combine several of these goldmines. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple only offer a backdoor through which the NSA can enter. Twitter is not included in this list, because thanks to the firehose the front door is always wide open!
PRISM
Modern data flow software, such as NSA's Accumulo, enables real-time monitoring of complex relationships in situations that exceed the capabilities of relational databases and traditional analytics methods.
“Just as the telescope allowed us to understand the universe and the microscope gave us insight into the world of germs, so new techniques for collecting and analyzing huge amounts of data will give us ways to understand a world we still barely understand.” (quote from the book The Big Data Revolution ).
Major revolutions in science often begin with a breakthrough in measurement. We are now at the beginning of a new era, comparable to the start of modern science in the 17th century. Again, measurement is the new knowledge. Only the questioning changes. Causality makes way for correlation. It is no longer necessary to know why something happens, but rather what happens. And in the PRISM case of terrorism, when something will happen. Or as data-mining expert Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro puts it in an interview with Slate : “You don't necessarily need the conversation if you have the network.” It is ' The End of Theory ' as Chris Anderson predicted in Wired magazine back in 2008. Big Data makes the scientific method redundant.
Conclusion
In 2009, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian said, “The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.” The same point was made again in 2012 in the article Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century . Now we still need the nerds to make soup of all this data. However, the expectation is that in the near future everyone will have their own PRISM-like technology. Their own toolset to analyze and interpret data.
the analytics big bang
We are already seeing this development happening, just think of the smart energy meters that provide insight into your energy consumption. The television looks back and even medicines keep an eye on you . Or Watson, IBM's supercomputer. This is currently being used to research cancer, but very soon this artificial intelligence will be made accessible to everyone via a Siri-like application. The above point is also made in the article Predictive analytics is shaping modern life :