Chapter 4 - Facilitators and relevant factors

4.4 The future is already here

4.4.1 Big Data - Future threats and developments

Big Data will become ‘bigger’ and ‘faster’ and become part of most decision processes. Big Data analysis will continue to be used, among other things, for data-driven security, for instance when looking for criminal patterns in real-time, or as part of the authentication process.

The volume and scope of Fast Data – data that is collected and analysed in real-time – will continue to increase, particularly in developing countries where (mobile) Internet access is on the rise. This will allow for novel ways of supporting decision processes in real time, early warning systems based on opinion mining, real-time awareness and real time feedback.

Big Data, together with the Internet of Everything, will expand existing and create new types of critical infrastructure. This in turn will create new privacy issues as these categories of data and their option value will offer new insights. For instance for smart homes this could be ‘load signatures’ that describe the power consumption of electrical devices that are unique to the appliance – this information can be used to determine when residents are not at home and provide insights into their daily behaviour and even illegal activities.

As more data is captured and cross-referenced, it will become harder to protect privacy and personal data as Big Data aids de-anonymisation – either through patterns and correlations that become visible in bigger data sets and/or the combination with other data sources. This will be further aided by readily available tools to perform OSINT analysis.

As the use of Big Data and predictive analytics will become the norm, the risk of equalling correlation with causality will increase. And so will the risk of using predictive analytics incorrectly.

Moreover, with the widespread adoption of Big Data, more companies will act as data broker by amassing large amounts of data, usually user related. Given the potential value and multi-purpose use of this data, we can expect to see more targeted attacks on data brokers, either to steal and sell the data, for ransom purposes, for political reasons or to actually use Big Data analytics to support more sophisticated attacks.