Big Data’s Dangerous New Era of Discrimination

[Commentary] Congratulations. You bought into Big Data and it’s paying off Big Time. You slice, dice, parse and process every screen-stroke, clickstream, Like, tweet and touch point that matters to your enterprise. You now know exactly who your best -- and worst -- customers, clients, employees and partners are. Knowledge is power. But what kind of power does all that knowledge buy? Big Data creates Big Dilemmas. Greater knowledge of customers creates new potential and power to discriminate. Big Data -- and its associated analytics -- dramatically increase both the dimensionality and degrees of freedom for detailed discrimination. So where, in your corporate culture and strategy, does value-added personalization and segmentation end and harmful discrimination begin?

[Michael Schrage is a research fellow at MIT Sloan School's Center for Digital Business]