Towards the Privatization of Big Data

With the possibility of risking consumer data privacy, organizations are faced with the pressure to find new solutions while still making use of Big Data. One of these solutions is to encrypt an organization’s consumer data.

Non-encrypted, “regular” consumer data is data which tells the story of the consumer. It can reveal personal details about consumers’ whereabouts, habits, preferences, relationships and the communities they belong to.

Using non-encrypted consumer data can lead to compromising data privacy in some way, as consumers may not have authorized the use of their personal information by a particular organization or organizational branch.

It is not just consumer data itself which can reveal personal information — its metadata, too, can expose many details about a person’s whereabouts.

Credit card metadata, for example, “can reveal civil, political, or religious affiliations; they can also reveal an individual’s social status, or whether and when he or she is involved in intimate relationships.” (Source, p.9)

Encryption is slowly becoming a standardized method of securing consumer data. Encrypted data is regular data which has been encoded, i.e.; it has been converted to strings of illegible symbols — a series of letters and numbers.

From the consumers’ end, encrypted data safeguards their personal information. For business organizations, encrypted consumer data typically equates to data which cannot be analyzed to gain new consumer insights.