Based on the movie, The Great Hack, I believe that big data is a total of many individual user’s data from different apps and corporations that can detect your future decisions based on your previous ones on the internet. For example, when I heard the statement where people might think the government is listening to us through our phone mic I totally believe it. There was this one time two years ago, my dad wanted to go on vacation and randomly said we should go to Alaska, even though he hates cold places. The next day I was scrolling through Instagram and saw ads of trips to Alaska. I was very surprised and kind of shook. 

Professor David Carroll was interested in the idea that huge platforms, such as Facebook, have the ability to obtain private users’ data while also sharing it among other companies. Carroll wanted to bring to the light what Cambridge Analytica and other companies were doing and wanted to regain his privacy/data. Also, it can’t get returned just like that. The saying, “whatever gets put on the internet stays on the internet” is very true and this is very much the reason. During the 2016 Election, Cambridge Analytica used the data they had and built profiles on people of the United States from Facebook. They created ads in order to persuade the people in order for them to vote with a specific mindset. This eventually led to a huge controversy and a well known trial where Mark Zuckerberg says he doesn’t know anything. 

This movie has a connection to the article we read, “Death of a Private Self”. We can see where social media has a lot of power over us and that you have to be careful with what you upload to the internet. Life without the internet is pretty impossible for someone living in this day and age so it’s all up to the individuals to protect themselves from the internet and their private information.