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The fine line between IoT data collection and privacy

This article is part of the Business Information issue of December 2015, Volume 3, Number 6
When the Lifelog architecture development and analytics team at Sony Mobile Communications set up a program for capturing and analyzing data from wearable devices linked to the activity tracking app, their biggest challenge wasn't technical in nature. It was getting clearance from the company's legal department on the proposed data collection and privacy practices. Jonas Sellergren, who manages the team, said at Strata + Hadoop World 2015 in New York City that it took some doing to balance "this opportunity and the risks a company exposes itself to with potentially sensitive data." And there's a lot of data involved: currently 5 terabytes per month, which Sony processes and analyzes in a Spark system running in the Amazon Web Services cloud. To help ease the legal concerns, Hakan Jonsson, a data scientist on the Lifelog team, said they adopted an "obvious-data-usage principle" specifying they should only collect data that can benefit the app's users. That wasn't an academic exercise. In one case, he said, "we decided not to ...
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British Gas streamlines its supply-chain logistics process
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Data storytelling, lauded for its potential, lags in practice
Educators and experts tout data storytelling as a way to better engage business managers with data, but others caution about overcrowding visuals.
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The fine line between IoT data collection and privacy
Designing mobile apps to capture and analyze IoT data is difficult enough, but a greater hurdle can be ensuring consumer privacy laws aren't violated.
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Shortage of data scientists, big data pros vexes IoT efforts
There's an abundance of big data technologies that can support Internet of Things projects, but the pool of IT professionals with the advanced know-how to handle massive amounts of IoT data is limited.
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FreeWire Technologies taps IoT to expand greener energy
With help from the Internet of Things, FreeWire Technologies developed mobile charging stations that keep personal devices, electronic cars and construction lights running.
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IoT applications seen by some as more 'talk than action'
Some headway has been made when it comes to the Internet of Things in manufacturing, but businesses still need to figure out what to do with all that new data.
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IoT apps still sparse, but promising
There's strong evidence that the IoT is gaining acceptance -- but only on a limited basis because of cost and equipment compatibility concerns.
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MapReduce(d) in the eyes of many Hadoop systems users
New technologies are augmenting -- and in some cases replacing -- the core components of Hadoop. Welcome to the new, not-so-settled reality of the big data era.