Between The NSA and Google. The Big Data Squeeze for Joe Social Pack

We are all feeling a little squeezed now days. We can thank our friends in Wall Street and our lax governmental institutions for that. The later have simply been debased by our ever present and amazingly effective lobbying monarchy.

If that was not bad enough, there is another more worrisome monarchy emerging around the concept of big data.

For those uninitiated, big data is all the data that is being collectively captured by all of us as we go about our day using our diverse technologies. This means your actions on the web, on your mobile devices, in your cars. It means data generated by your credit card activities, your shopping patterns, your health care patterns.

Everything is now 'capturable' and available for analysis.

All these data points are now available to the content providers and of course our spy agencies like the NSA. Some of these data points are innocuous, perhaps, when viewed independently. But they are immensely powerful when triangulated and analyzed with the other data points. This activity is already leading to predictive capabilities. Now, this is not necessarily bad if put it to good use like fighting crime (Tome Cruise in the movie Minority Report comes to mind). But when used for nefarious purposes, watch out.

Here is the thing everyone needs to deeply understand. All the information that we generate as we go living our lives is being captured and monetized by our content companies. Some of us benefit in the back end from owning their stock. But for those 90% of American's that do not own stocks or 401k accounts, well, they derive little.

It never ceases to amaze me how little people are aware of this evolving monarchies. I start by telling people to read the fine print in Google's and Facebook's contracts. Everything that is posted - and I mean every word, action, picture - that is posted with these content enablers becomes their property. Period. This means - as I was conveying to a photographer niece of mine - that that wonderful picture she took and showed on Facebook is the property of Facebook and if she ever wanted to monetize said picture (it was an exquisite picture that could be a price winner for an advertiser) Facebook would have the right to claim it as theirs. Period. She was shocked to find this out and promptly brought the picture down. Too late of course, because a copy will probably remain in Facebook's servers for a long time.

All I am saying is be informed and conscious of the fact that our collective creative impulses is the business model for Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.. It is also the business model for the NSA (in a manner of speaking).  For all of us that are part of these business models (like it or not) we get very little in return. We get no compensation for the generation of this data and we have little control over it.

In an ironic twist, with some providers, we pay them to have them take our data and monetize it. Examples here are our mobile service providers and our over the top content providers (Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, all mobile Apps on your phone, etc.)

So where is the big squeeze, you ask? Well, between the NSA microscopically monitoring our use and the content enablers macroscopically amassing greater power every day.

We are, in essence, enabling these monarchies with our data. I am just saying. Or, as the old saying goes:

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Or, like Bruce Springsteen sings:

'A poor man wants to be rich, a rich man wants to be king, and a king wants everything'

Happy Holidays.