Big Data and Privacy Issues

With the advent of social networks, mobile technologies, smart phones, tablet devices, Web 2.0, prospective semantic Web, geolocation technologies and machine to machine communications (M2M) we are faced with a never before seen amount of Data -thus Big Data. We are also witnessing leap improvements in the data mining, machine learning techniques that will enable the analysis of this Big Data to come up with results that may be utilized for a plethora of purposes by the individuals, enterprises and even governments. As a result of these major changes we are sailing in uncharted territories from the perspective of Privacy and Data Protection of the individuals. Proper mitigation of the aforementioned issues necessitates a coherent effort within the domains of technology and policy to come up with legislations and regulations that will support the tech developments but at the same time fulfill the Privacy and Data Protection requirements of individuals.