Ethical considerations

Big data often involves the gathering of large volumes of data that may contain users' personal information. Companies such as Facebook and Google have flourished on analyzing individual information to target ads and perform other types of marketing. This evidently poses an ethical dilemma. To what extent should personal data be collected? And how much is too much? There are, of course, no correct answers to these questions. The rise of hacking in which information from hundreds of millions of user accounts has been compromised is so commonplace today that we have almost become complacent about the consequences.

In October 2017, Yahoo! disclosed that 3 billion accounts, in fact every single account on Yahoo!, had suffered a data breach. Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting companies in the US suffered a data breach that exposed the personal details of more than 140 million consumers. There were scores of other similar incidents, and in all of them, the common...