Database Reference
In-Depth Information
the employer (imagine your own name the subject of a court case). This case is
before the courts today and will certainly set a precedent, but it illustrates that
there is at least perceived, if not factual, value (we think it's the latter) embodied
within the Twitter ecosystem.
Most of today's collected data is also temporally and spatially enriched.
For example, we know where one of the stars of the television show
Myth
Busters
lives—not because he told us, but because he tweeted a picture of his
car with location-based services (LBS) enabled on his smart device and ended
up sharing his home's geographic (LAT/LONG) coordinates with over
650,000 of his closest friends! Most people don't know what LBS is, but they
have it turned on because they're using some mobile mapping application.
These days, folks just let you know when they've checked in at the gym or
what restaurant they're in through social apps that just convert geographic
coordinates into easily identifiable places. Such data often has built-in loca-
tion awareness, which represents another tremendous opportunity for finer
granularities of personalization or profiled risk assessment,
if
… Today, a
number of major credit card companies have programs based on this
approach that you can join; for example, if you purchase a coffee using your
credit card, they will profile your location (via LBS), your purchase history,
and make an offer that is tailored to you from a retailer in the proximity of
your current location.
Time stamps are ubiquitous, and include, among others, the autodating
metadata on the pictures that were taken with your camera or smart phone,
the time of your Facebook posts, and the times when you turn on your smart
phone or watch your favorite show, and so on; in fact, it's getting kind of easy
to construct a timeline of your life. If you consider that, on average, commuters
in London, England will have their picture taken over 150 times a day as they
make their way home from London's downtown core, and then add that to
the variety of sentiment, temporal, and spatial data that's generated during
that time frame, you've got a lot of information—Big Data information—at
your disposal.
