A middle school student wants to buy a new pair of jeans and has been comparing prices online. To her email advertising a special surprise, she receives an sale on jeans from one of the websites that she visited. banner advertisement for that Soon after, she sees a same website while surfing the Internet. How could this be? It is all because of "big data" ― a revolution in the way that customer data is being collected and utilized. These days, it is not hard for companies to gather huge amounts of customer data. What's difficult is putting it all to good use. When properly analyzed, big data can show patterns and trends that can be useful in predicting what a shopper will be interested in. In other words, big data is less about huge increases in storage capacity and more about improved statistical and computational methods that actually make all of this data useful. One example of a company making the best use of big data is Amazon.com. Amazon keeps track of what items people purchase on their website, which items are in a shopper's virtual shopping cart, and even which items they have only viewed. Then, they use this data to provide customers with a personalized shopping experience. As soon as shoppers return to the website, they are shown both items that they have already considered purchasing and items that Amazon predicts that they will be interested in. In fact, 29% of Amazon's sales now come through these recommendations. But there are also concerns about big data, both for the customers whose data is being collected and for the companies trying to use it. One of the biggest issues is privacy because data is often sold to third parties without the customers knowing. Also, companies like Amazon depend on Internet search terms, but these can be misleading because the words that people search are not always related to what they would like to purchase. In spite of these problems, it is clear that big date has revolutionized the way that individuals interact with the online world.
