There is an estimated 1.2 zettabytes (1.3 trillion gigabytes) of data on the internet. That’s a LOT of data, more than what me and you can fathom. Web searches, web pages, downloads, code, games, YouTube, email… the list goes on. But here's an interesting question: How does one sift through this literal sea of data. There is WAY more data than people at a company, and attempting to go through all of this data requires a complex system of data reading and scanning. Online privacy is a joke; online archives store your facebook post. In fact, there is a bot which is almost guaranteed to read all of your posts. GoogleBot, the name of the googlebot that sifts through hundreds of thousands of web pages, is given access to all of your facebook posts. But what is this bot doing? When it travels through websites, it collects data that the website has. So statistics, key phrases, and many other key points of data that the site has. So what’s the point? What does all of this data do?
The answer is advertising. Google makes most of it’s money from advertising, and this funds all of their projects and data collection. It can target ads to you based on your search history, the websites you browse, etc. Also, some companies sift through massive amounts of data to provide investors with advice and statistics on trending companies and services which would be profitable soon. Big data has a lot of applications, from just a simple advertisement to millions of dollars in the stock market.
So what is big data doing? It is monitoring everyone. This can be used for good and bad.
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