Solved: Discuss the invasion of privacy and the potential for future abuse as individual data is

Big data generated through gathered personal data, its analysis and commercial use has led to many promising breakthroughs in health care, physical safety in cities, cleaner environment policies, and effective marketing. Yet, privacy and the potential of future abuse of this personal data is always a concern, as it can potentially lead to power strains between governments, businesses and individuals and also result in prosecutorial abuse, discrimination, racial or other forms of profiling, over-criminalization, redlining, restricted freedoms, etc.

In many cases, gathering, analysis and commercial use of personal data has directly benefitted the individual like in the case of the customization offered to individual customers by players like Amazon and Netflix. Another such example is Comcast’s proactive monitoring of its customers’ computers for detection of any malwares. Google’s auto complete and translate functions also work on comprehensive data collection and its real-time analysis.

But there is another harsher side of the picture also. Consumer privacy and potential abuse are the fears railing of these practices. Commercial collection of an individual’s personal information implicates a range of potential threats, essentially the threat of data breach, unwanted secondary usage (selling data to data brokers), government access, internal misuse by rouge employees of the collecting company (data voyeurism), and chilling effects on consumer behavior.

There have been multiple cases in the recent past, where companies have experienced data breaches due to external hacking or inadequate security. For example, the Target data breach which rocked the country in 2014. Around 40 million debit and credit card data were stolen during the 2014 holiday shopping time. Other examples like Neiman Marcus data breach, White Lodging Services Corporation data breach, Sally Beauty, Michaels, 11 casinos, PF Changs’s China Bistro, UPS data breach, etc. all point towards the risks or potential abuse of the personal data gathered, analyzed for commercial uses.