Big Data Is Still Only a Little Helpful

"Big data" is one of the tech world's ubiquitous buzzwords. In the old days, people just called it data, but in Silicon Valley it's not a thing unless it's big. It's not yet obvious, however, that data collected by various internet services is any more useful than those mined in more traditional ways -- through surveys, for example.

As consumers, we know the data collected by big internet companies can be used to push goods and services -- mostly things very much like those we have already purchased. They can also be studied to explain our behavior on social networks: Facebook's data science team does a lot of that kind of work on its own and with academic institutions. As Joonas Tuhkuri of the University of Helsinki put it in a recent paper, "Google data is one of the largest data sets ever collected. Forecasters and researchers alike need to know how useful it actually is." In other words, can this information say anything about real-world phenomena?