back to article Building big data? Are you building a security headache too?

The world and its dog has been shocked by the Prism news story. Early in June, we found out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had developed a secret data-gathering mechanism to steal all our data and store it in a large data warehouse. We are outraged that it is being mined, searched and otherwise prodded. But do we …

COMMENTS

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  1. Richard Wharram

    Data Warehouse?

    I might be wrong but I'd be surprised if PRISM is storing the data it slurps in a Data Warehouse. That would imply the data is being normalised to 3NF or a snowflake schema. You can't do that unless you absolutely understand the meaning of every bit of data you've been given. They'd run the risk of normalising away some potentially meaningful data.

    TL:DR on the rest after that sorry. Maybe later...

  2. Andyb@B5
    Alert

    "At least the NSA is well trained in keeping it all under lock and key."

    Optimism, I like that occasionally in articles.

  3. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    "pseudo anonymized."

    Or as we call it un anonymized.

  4. Ian Michael Gumby
    Coat

    This was going to be a joke post... but....

    "Early in June, we found out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had developed a secret data-gathering mechanism to steal all our data and store it in a large data warehouse."

    Its called Google. No wait Facebook. No wait AOL, or was it Yahoo!

    I was going to make light of this fact, but then it became obvious that it wasn't a joke anymore.

    Its ironic that people want to riot over PRISM, but yet freely give this information to private companies that have less legal requirements than the US Government concerning personal data.

    What people don't know is how much information Google and FB know about you, even if you don't have a FB account or use Google for search.

    Unless you're extremely paranoid and use not only adbloc but also noscript... every site you hit has google analytics. (Right El Reg?) Then there's Google Tag Services.

    What about when you use FB to log in to your favorite news site and want to post comments? FB knows who you are. Even if you don't have FB, sites are including FB scripts and unless you forbid it... you are SOL...

    Then there's tying the site's functionality to these tracking scripts. That is that if you want the page to behave normally, your data is going to be tracked by them. Now you'll get to a point that you don't want to continue to jump through hoops and finally give in.

    The NSA? Meh. Amateurs compared to Google and FB.

    Think about it for a while...

    Mine's the jacket with the foil lining.

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