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Big Data… Big Money… Big Brother

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2016 is set to be the year of big data. Given its implications and the population of China, this means very very big data.

It also means different things for different people. China Daily is content for it to simply mean “big infographic”, for BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) it means goldmine, and for the individual it means unprecedented access to information covering every facet of modern life, and some of the more mundane too.

So how does big data really work? Well, it’s simple really. So simple a computer can do it. What it all boils down to is databases, or specifically, relational database management systems (RDBMS).

Let’s say you’re growing a plant; a radish plant for example. Your website nanjingbigradish.com uses a MySQL database (named, interestingly, after co-founder Michael Widenius’s daughter, My), as do a very large percentage of the world’s websites, to store the data about your radish. As you go off outside trying to find buyers for your radish, your colleague enters information about it into the website’s database. You are then able to sit with your client and look at the website to show quantitive data over how nice and globular is the root of your radish.

That’s Step 1. Step 2 is to take out the part where you visit your clients. To do this, your website’s database needs to “talk” to that of nanjingwetmarket.com. Suddenly now, there is a big league table of all the radishes in Nanjing; good news on one hand, as your market has become much bigger; bad news on the other, as you have to be more competitive.

The challenge of big data lies in the aforementioned talking between databases. Last month, the European Chamber of Commerce, Nanjing Chapter, held a one-day training course on big data on 10 March, that attracted members from the auto part, home appliance and airline industries. As well as really getting down to he nuts and bolts of those databases, the seminar was also a fascinating insight (albeit at times slightly over this correspondent’s head) to the inner churning that powers the likes of Google and Facebook.

Mei Zhang, General Manager EUCCC Nanjing, commented, “To transform the country from the world’s factory into a more sophisticated manufacturing power, China has launched the initiatives of China Manufacturing 2025 and Internet+. Against this background, the European Chamber Nanjing has organised events centred on the initiatives, including big data, cloud computing and smart factory tour, to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and technology between members”.

The State Council’s action framework for promoting big data, as ratified by Premier Li Keqiang, seeks to establish a new model for social governance over the next 5-10 years. With an initial and ambitious deadline that is the end of next year, it seeks to create a data sharing platform between government departments that allows the general public to access all manner of data, including that relating to credit, transport, health, employment, culture, education, science, agriculture, finance and weather.

In the words of an official statement released by the Council, “the government will set up an overall coordination mechanism for big data development and application, speed up the establishment of relevant rules, and encourage cooperation between the government, enterprises and institutions”.

That’s all very well, and it certainly sounds nice, on the surface. However, it is banded about that` the most important (read “profit- able”) use of consumer data is the extraction of purchase preferences and patterns to create highly targeted value-added services and products. Since knowing I was going to have to write this article, I have been struggling to get to get to grips with what makes me so uncomfortable about this, and finally I know. It’s the big brother of it all. According to an article on the website ClickZ, “Baidu alone has thousands of analysts assessing data every day – will give retailers and other industries unprecedented accuracy in profiling the people buying their products and using their services, rich in both detail and opportunity”. That was two years ago; imagine how many they have now.

One such data exploitation has been made by Alibaba, in it taking the data accumulated by its online shops to assess a borrower’s ability to repay a loan. Juxtapose this with George Orwell’s “1984” in which the Party [not to be confused] presents its vision of the future; “Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler”, and my fears have become manifest.

Big data also pushes the individual out of the window, attempting to reduce us to averages, those that statistically say I should he interested in this, as are x percent of “similar people”.

Have we been enriched by big data? Is everything that much better because of it? The fact that I have driven down to Metro should be indication enough that I don’t care that one particular product is 0.9 kuai cheaper than at Auchan, so why waste my time on the opportunity cost presented by having to go through the chaos that your car park represents? Big data can’t work that out for you? Your text messages are nothing more than a nuisance.

Next time around, we hope for “big data; big interest”. In the meantime, what I would like to see a lot more of is, Small Data. Let’s see if the government can deliver that by 2017.

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