Cathy O'Neil Quotes

Data is the new soil, because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments.

If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.

The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments.

Many well-meaning attempts to address public concern about privacy reflect an outdated understanding of the contemporary data ecosystem.

If there can be three certain things in life, instead of two, it might be death, taxes, and data.

Everything is changing now that we are in the cloud in terms of sharing our data, understanding our data using new techniques like machine learning.

I'm going to say something rather controversial. Big data, as people understand it today, is just a bigger version of small data. Fundamentally, what we're doing with data has not changed; there's just more of it.

With big data comes big responsibilities.

Data are becoming the new raw material of business.

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.

Big Data is just that - big. But, it's a term that is largely misunderstood and difficult to explain.

Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.

We get more data about people than any other data company gets about people, about anything - and it's not even close. We're looking at what you know, what you don't know, how you learn best. The big difference between us and other big data companies is that we're not ever marketing your data to a third party for any reason.

Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data.

I am completely opposed to the concept of big data.

As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?

We're not in an information age anymore. We're in the information management age.

The fact is that data are worth a lot of money.

I clearly say yes to Big Data, yes to greater security and convenience, but no to paternalism and Big Brother.'

If the government can manage to collect and release personal information in a secure and useful way, so can private companies, which will empower consumers to become better shoppers.

Every company has messy data, and even the best of AI companies are not fully satisfied with their data. If you have data, it is probably a good idea to get an AI team to have a look at it and give feedback. This can develop into a positive feedback loop for both the IT and AI teams in any company.

Big data knows and can deduce more about you than Big Brother ever could.

As medical data has such power to deliver better understanding of disease and better patient outcomes, it is important we find the best way of sharing it.

I hope that, in the future, data is used to empower people and not just for marketing purposes.

By now, we all know that our every move online can be tracked and traced, and that, ideally, services learn from and adapt to customers based on an artful deployment of that data.