Now that data is being collected everyday from many different sources, the way that the data is being used and how to use people’s data ethically is a question that has been on the rise. Privacy must be maintained but now that big data is becoming more possible is that even something that can be accomplished. The use of big data is dangerous because it allows a dataset that has been cleaned to try and maintain privacy can be cross referenced with other data sources and work to deanonymize the original data set. This was seen with a Netflix dataset which was cleaned but ended up being reproduced by comparing it to data from IMDb. Again this was seen with New York taxi drivers and their addresses were able to be uncovered by a different dataset that was openly available. Because there is so much data out there it is seen as impossible to now try and maintain privacy in one dataset when the information might already be accessible in a different set of data. However approaches to this problem have been proposed such as providing technically incorrect information by working to change the data so that the average of points stays the same but the individual data points are not equal to their original value. This is called differential privacy which companies have been using to try and gain results without giving out information about each person. Homomorphic encryption is another way that has been proposed by having it so that data is unreadable but can still be used and manipulated.
