Every day, millions of users dutifully follow suggestions made by unknown algorithms housed on a global network of servers (who knows where they are actually located!) owned by companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon who collect, aggregate and constantly dissect ‘user-generated’ data. We ‘like’ friends’ photos, links and everyday thoughts. We ‘share’ our moments, even right after crash landing of an airplane. We follow the ‘recommendations’ for music, movie, books, recipe and even dating. Not only these data affect our online behaviors on social media, they affect local traffic patterns, political elections and stock prices. It seems as if we all love big data, and it turns out that our governments like it even more. We are indeed living in the era of big data.
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Youngjin Yoo (2015) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched one closely related paper. Consider it for comparative context: