The TED Talk, “Future Without Secrets,” given by Alessandro Acquisti, is focused largely on the idea of what people call, Big Data, and the thought that it is a relatively positive thing. Overall, Acquisti talks about how technologies are developing so much, so fast, that there may be a point when an organization knows more about an individual than the individual knows about themselves. He claims that though the idea of this may be scary, as many may think it is dangerous, Big Data is actually quite beneficial. Overall, I don’t think I agree with Aquisti’s claim because I feel that there isn’t necessarily a need for Big Data. Some information that these organizations are gathering, may be information that individuals want to keep to themselves. Through the presentation, Acquisti mentions a lot of different experiments that they conducted. The one that captured my interest was the one that ended up being able to generate someone’s social security number, just by having facial recognition of them. According to the study, 27% of subjects first 5 SSN digits were identified. Acquisti said, “From public information, could we find non-public information? The answer is Yes, we could, and we did.” Hearing this information makes me think quite a bit. If large companies can gain access to someone’s social security number without the person knowing, this could easily lead to identity theft and worse. Sure, the idea of an app being able to take two faces of people you know, mix them together, and then use that face in an advertisement for a product they want you to buy, seems pretty cool. However, I don’t think it’s the answer. In the TED Talk, Acquisti mentions how, “in the future, organizations will have so much information about us that they will be able to infer our desires before we even form them.” In my opinion, there are other ways that organizations can go about finding what products to sell, such as client surveys, and things that are much less invasive of private information.
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