“There is, however, a new flavor of innovation on the scene: Big Data. “Big Data”is shorthand for the combination of a technology and a process. The technology is a configuration of information processing hardware capable of sifting, sorting and interrogating vast quantities of data in very short times. The process involves mining the data for patterns, distilling the patterns into predictive analytics, and applying the analytics to new data. Together, the technology and the process comprise a technique for converting data flows into a particular, highly data-intensive type of knowledge. The technique of Big Data can be used to analyze data about the physical world—for example, climate or seismological data—or it can be used to analyze physical, transactional, and behavioral data about people. So used, it is vastly more nimble than old category-driven profiling developed in the late twentieth century and now widely criticized. According to its enthusiasts, Big Data will usher in a new era of knowledge production and innovation, producing enormous benefits to science and business alike.According to its critics, Big Data is profiling on steroids, unthinkably intrusive and eerily omniscient”.
http://www.harvardlawreview.org/symposium/papers2012/cohen.pdf
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