Wired Editorial: “OkCupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-Data Science”

We clearly have entered the era of big data. Armed with petabytes of transaction data, clickstreams and cookie logs, as well as data from social networks, mobile phones, and the “internet of things,” a wide range of economic interests, including consumer marketing, health care, manufacturing, education, and government, are now in pursuit of the value of data-driven decision making that big data promises. At the same time, the big data that increasingly fuels economic decision-making has emerged as a rich terrain for engaging in academic research and experimentation: think of the “Facebook emotional contagion” experiment of 2014, where the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users were altered to study the impact on mood; or when Harvard researchers released the first wave of their “Tastes, Ties and Time” dataset in 2008, comprising…


Link to Full Article: Wired Editorial: “OkCupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-Data Science”

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