Question

Read textbook page 225 “Future Vision – Big Data as a Strategic Weapon”. Answer either question (1) What strategic connection(s) do you see between big data and social media? Or question (2) What ethical obstacles might big data present? (3) How can managers overcome those obstacles?

Answer 1

1. Big data and social media have some common functionality between them. Both the services are made up of data, one has personal data that relates to a person while the other has a variety of data that can be used in all sorts of fields in management. Big data also make use of personal data that is given by the user's online habits which include shopping, surfing and interests. Therefore both the services utilize the same model and in fact, big data receives data from a lot of social media data too.

2. Big data collects a lot of data that may be private in nature and people may not want to share their private data. Therefore, big data proves to be an unethical area of study if we consider the privacy of people. Other than that, it provides people with the ability to utilize data from. All the corners of the internet and allow the utilization of said data under the ethical boundaries of reason.

3. Managers can overcome these ethical obstacles by allowing the collection of data which the user has agreed to share. This means that only the data which is relevant, not personal and is not collected through unfair means will be processed and the data that is unethical in nature will be discarded and essentially not used. Screening processes can be created which will allow teachers to select the type of data to be processed and therefore create an efficient system which only works on the ethical principles and respects the privacy of everybody.