Big Data Privacy: Key Threats, Challenges, and Solutions Explored

This essay delves into the critical issue of big data privacy, highlighting the escalating threats posed to personal and organizational data in the digital age. It begins by defining big data and explaining its pervasive role in daily business activities, emphasizing the importance of securing this vast amount of information. The essay identifies four primary threats to big data privacy: discrimination, disclosures, transparency, and surveillance, elaborating on how each can compromise data security and individual rights. Furthermore, it addresses the challenges in ensuring big data privacy, such as insecure web and cloud interfaces, lack of authorized logins, and poor database configurations. The essay proposes solutions to these challenges, including creating secure interfaces, implementing strict login protocols, and establishing transparent privacy policies. It concludes by underscoring the growing concern for big data security and privacy due to increased cybercrimes and the need for organizations and individuals to protect their data, advocating for proactive measures to safeguard sensitive information in the digital landscape. Desklib offers a platform for students to explore similar assignments and past papers.

Big Data
Privacy threat to Big data

What is big data?
• Big data is a large volume of data that is
comprised in businesses’ day to day activities.
• Big data mainly manages large volume of data
that cannot be managed by common software
due to the large size.
• Big Data includes both structured and
unstructured forms of data.

Understanding big data
• People carry out daily business transactions
which are also a part of big data.
• Large organizations, for example, are always
carrying out business transactions
•

Big data privacy threats.
• Big data privacy is such a big issue that needs to be addressed
because daily people are sharing more and more information.
• Most of the times, this information is private and
confidential. Therefore the people want to know that the data
they are sharing over the technology is secured and will not
fall into the wrong hands.
• Most of this information is shared on social platforms and
therefore, a secure framework needs to be implemented for
the platforms.
• The debate on whether big data provides top notch security
of information is a hot topic currently.

Big data threats
• There are four main components of big data threats
and these are
• Discrimination, disclosures, transparency, surveillance
• These are the key issues that are a threat to the
privacy and security of big data.
• In discrimination the data collected about a person or
organisation is used as a basis on how to treat them.
• Another way of discrimination is through personalized
persuasion.

Disclosures
• Disclosure is when information shared on a certain
platform, is used out of the context of that platform.
• For instance in a hospital a nurse may decide to look
up information about a certain famous singer admitted
to the hospital just out of curiosity.
• The nurse is not supposed to access this information
for personal reasons but only for medical reasons.
• Therefore the privacy of an individual is not
guaranteed

Transparency
• The lack of transparency can also be
categorized as a threat to big data.
• When an individual feels that the platform they
are using to share personal information is not
transparent with them then they feel like it is a
threat to their privacy and security.
• Individuals prefer when the database they are
using provide full disclosures on the security
and privacy policies.

Surveillance
• Surveillance is basically the feeling of being
watched.
• As a person, we carry out our day to day
activities freely but when we start to question
who is watching us then we do things more
cautiously.
• In the case of big data people will avoid
searching information from certain sources.
•

Challenges in big data privacy
• Some of the challenges in ensuring big data is
secure and private are:
• Web interfaces are not secure allowing a
hacker to attack a system.
• Lack of authorized log ins. In this instance an
attacker can gain access to information in a
database.

• The information from internet services and other
systems may not be protected due to privacy
concerns.
• Cloud interfaces that are not secure therefore a hacker
can easily hack the system to access information.
• Mobile interfaces that are not secure therefore a
hacker can access the information in the system.
• Poor configuration in data base systems allowing
attackers to access information.

Solutions to the challenges
• Creation of web interfaces that are secure,
therefore attackers will not be able to hack
systems
• Creating authorized log ins so that not anyone
can access information.

• Addressing privacy concerns by creating
policies that assure the data is protected.
• Creating cloud interfaces that are secure and
therefore hackers cannot access easily.
• Creating mobile interfaces that are secure and
therefore hackers cannot access easily.