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Big Data Knows When You Are About To Quit Your Job
HughPickens.com writes Quentin Hardy reports at the NYT that a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations has announced new products that provide the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the software, called Insight Applications, predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets. "We've applied machine learning to affect consumer tastes," says Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. "Putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right." Already, Sabah says, "we're surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job." The goal is to predict future business outcomes to take advantage of opportunities and cut risk levels. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won't make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. "Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations."
Why would you be opposed to big data finding out when you take a dump in the morning, as long as its voluntary?
If you do all your internet activity through tor, and don't subscribe to cable TV, and find non-identifiable ways to obtain your video entertainment, the only thing big data can work with is your bank account, credit card, library card, and social security number. (And cash payments can limit what your credit card can say about you.)
It won't keep you safe from the NSA, but big business isn't holding a gun to your head (yet).
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
If you find it hilarious, you've been fortunate. I tried opening a online CD with Nationwide Bank by calling them, and they asked me questions about my background which they believed the "real" me could answer, and I couldn't. I later realized that the questions were based on Trans Union's error years earlier, when they were incorrectly convinced I had a certain second name and address several states away. I (after much willful stupidity and/or incompetence on TU's part) had gotten that sorted out, but the error had apparently propagated (with further garbling) to whatever source Nationwide was using and unwisely treating as gospel.
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