Today we make friends on social media. We date people. We express our views and opinions online, and establish allegiances. Big data helps us to select our marriage partner, without depending upon parents or community networks. In fact, an algorithm serves as our parents — matching us with our partners. This is the way, society has been reshaped fundamentally. In a way, the significance of big data has increased in the last 20 years. Big data has become absolutely fundamental and disruptive.

Just an entry in the search engine, and there appears a whole lot of information in a second on the topic. What an amazing agglomeration of data!

Some innovations in the previous century changed how data can be used. Had it not been for these innovations, we would have faced the issue of finding a needle in the haystack, while dealing with big data. Both these innovations have emerged from Google. The first innovation is Hadoop. It allows the storage of unlimited data in multiple locations on economical servers — this is what we call the Cloud. The second innovation is crawling or searching the data haystacks in a very short time. The credit for web crawling goes to Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google.

Big Data has generated methods like tracking, cookies, and mobile fingerprints which could be used for surveillance. Digital advertising uses it for precise targeting. Advertising has been reshaped by data.

Brands collect first party data and third party data through cookies and fingerprints on consumers. All this goes to the DSP or demand side platform. The publishers of media too collect data received by SSP or supply side platform. There are Ad Exchanges where the requirements of DSPs and SSPs are matched, and they sell insertions of digital ads.