Your Digital Exhaust Is Polluting the Data Atmosphere [#Infographic]

Big data keeps getting bigger. That increases the potential value but also makes it harder to harvest the data. Without processing, big data benefits no one. And any benefits would have to be significant to outweigh the privacy concerns many people have. According to this infographic from Online Business Degree, 39 percent of people believe that big data will “cause more problems than it solves between now and 2020.”

The infographic also highlights an old term — digital exhaust — that is resurfacing as the big data conversation ramps up:

[Todd] Papaioannou calls this unstructured data “digital exhaust,” everything consumers do on a daily basis — clicks, tweets, searches, Facebook posts. Companies can use it to offer more customized experiences for consumers online — content and deal targeting, advertising and sentiment analysis — but they have to process it first.

“Who cares if you’re able to get data signals if you can’t act on it?” Papaiaonnou said, noting Hadoop isn’t real time. “To get to real time you have to take the human out of the equation and [start] allowing machines to make these decisions.”

Read Filtering the digital exhaust on GigaOM.

But clicks and tweets are just the beginning. As the infographic shows, data is being tracked by sensors in soil, casino chips and pet collars. Until analytics software can catch up, big data will remain only partially utilized.

Check out the infographic below to learn more about what the future of big data looks like.

This infographic originally appeared on Online Business Degree.