With the immense potential of Big Data comes a bigger issue—privacy. Richard Snee has immense vision on big data,with notable regard to key players like Hadoop and Greenplum.  With privacy issues heightening in the cloud, the issue has resurfaced with renewed strength.

This is especially true with the big data trends for the past few weeks. Giants like Apple, Twitter and Google are now being sued over allegations of secretly recording and storing location data, invasion of privacy and a more peculiar violation of the Telephone Consumer Act of 1991. For some, system failure and hacking were the culprits. Sony, just recently admitted that their PlayStation was hacked and personal information were stolen. Another catastrophic event struck Amazon as its EC2 crashed, a topic further detailed by Kit Doston in his analysis read on SiliconANGLE.com.

But despite high profiled breaches and information leaks, people are still turning over data online. It could be that life has already grown within the digital sphere with activities like socializing, shopping, learning and gaming that even security threats are no longer appealing to some point.

Jim Dempsey, an expert on Internet privacy at the Center for Democracy & Technology made a compelling statement regarding this matter. He said, “We are clearly schizophrenic about this technology. We love it, we use it, we expect it to work, and we’ve woven it into our daily lives, professionally, socially and personally. But we really don’t trust it, and we do get upset when our data is lost or stolen.”

With big data being the heartbeat of cloud mobile and social networking, it is vital that data is kept locked up in a tightly sealed vault of confidentiality. Without security, users will practically and virtually lose their identity, leading to an immeasurable fiasco. All these issues going-on, will big data stand the test of these rough times?  Certainly, but the question remains, where will standards and regulations lie, and who will establish them all?