Transparentness under era of Big Data

Yesterday, I had a dinner with my Friend Dong. He has a watch on his wrist. It sounds very normal. Everyone can have a watch. But his watch is different from other watches. He introduced to me that his watch was able to accurately track steps taken, stairs climbed, calories burned and distance traveled. More surprisingly, this watch could discover sleep pattern.

If a watch wants to record how deep a person was sleeping, it has to understand the person’s heart rate. Heart rate tracking is not the latest technology. When a few years ago, I started to use treadmill, I had already seen such a technology. But applying this technology on a watch is a totally different concept. People could wear a watch all the time, especially a watch, such as my friend’s, that has a design with the textured band is durable enough to withstand rain, the shower and sweatiest workout, and comfortable enough to wear while sleeping. Such a watch could track one’s heart rate day by day and therefore could easily analyze and understand one’s emotion by some sort of modeling. I believe such an analysis is not difficult at all if obtaining sufficient data from a person. Therefore, a watch company could know a person’s emotion.

The real scary part is that a watch could simultaneously know one’s location and emotion. Imagine this, a smart watcher user everyday goes by a golf store. When he goes by the golf store, his heart rate is always a little bit higher than normal. The smart watch company through some analysis concludes that the higher heart rate is from excitement. Thus, the smart watch company concludes that his user likes golf and provides this information to the golf store. As a result, when that user goes by the golf store again, advertisement of discount or other information about that golf store automatically shows on his phone. With the accuracy of knowing a consumers’ insight, the advertisements would become every efficient.

Getting accurate advertisement to some extent is a good thing because people at least don’t have to receive some useless advertisements anymore. However,  people also lose the right of keeping privacy. 

In big data era, we are ready to get customers' information. But, are we ready to keep it at a comfortable level for customers?