Big Data is Watching You!

There's a boom in large-scale analytics. The subjects of this analysis may be categorized as:

• People
• Financial trades
• Electronic networks
• Everything else

... Some of the most interesting use cases are concentrated in the areas of identifying individuals, groups of people, or behaviors of (groups of) people. For example:

• comScore works hard to identify individual web surfers - i.e. to deanonymize them - even though they may have given incomplete or false personal information.
• Other companies at least try to figure out which information in a user's profile is unreliable, so as to classify them better. (Yes, there are 62-year-old video-game-obsessed Lady Gaga fans, but that's generally not the way to bet.)
• Multiple telecom vendors try to identify who their most influential customers are (to a first approximation, they're the ones most often called by the most people, but it surely gets more sophisticated than that). This information is then used to reduce churn, either by working hard to retain those users, or - if they do churn - to move very fast to retain the business from their friends.
• Other kinds of companies do similar kinds of analysis, to the extent that they have enough of a social graph to do so. (This application is a case where the term "social graph" is not a misnomer.)
• Turing detectives (I just coined that phrase) try to determine whether users are humans or bots.
• Central to detecting insurance fraud is identifying suspiciously close connections between claimants, service providers, and so on.
• Identifying groups of people is also important in flagging insider trading. Even more important are other kinds of analysis, along the lines of "is this normal innocent trading behavior?"
• Intelligence agencies try to detect networks of terrorists and their sympathizers. They further try to identify unusual patterns of communication or meetings along those networks that might indicate terrorist acts are being planned. (Civilian law enforcement agencies can use similar techniques.)

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