These companies and organizations utilize Big Data to benefit from the consolidation of data and prediction of behaviors and trends to better optimize their business practices. The more common use Big Data to target specific customers with specialized advertisements individualized based on their needs. Through the use of Big Data, retailers can collect data based on recent purchase histories, views of a product, and time spent looking at a product [3, 5, 9, 12]. These data sources, as well as other sources, help aid the algorithm used to predict where, when, and what people will buy next [5, 9, 12]. Utilization of Big Data to better optimize internal business practices has been adopted by many companies and organizations and continues to grow as the benefits become more apparent. Algorithms can predict trends on social media and web searches to optimize business practices [5]. For example, inventory management, drivers can take algorithms predict routes that are the safest, most efficient routes, and car manufacturers can use Big Data to improve vehicle quality based on information gathered from drivers’ behaviors to better suit their needs [5, …show more content…
Everything including our “income, our credit rating and history, our love life, race, ethnicity, religion, interests, travel history and plans, hobbies, health concerns, spending habits and millions of other data points about our private lives [2]” has been mined and is known by corporations, organizations, and marketers. The idea that there are entities that have stored countless amounts of data over everything in a person’s life is called the “creep factor [2].” To make the situation creepier, everyone and everything that generates data, called “data generators [2],” either do not know that data is being collected about them or do not know “who is collecting data about them and … how that data is being used [2].” For example, in 2010, an investigation by the Washington Post reported that “the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is said to intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other communications every day