There is an expectation that the role of social media in big data and analytics will grow and broaden. Given that there will be new data sources, more organizations will use these in order to generate their transformations. After all of this has been done, there will be more considerable benefits gotten out of social networking. The growth in the number of organizations using the social media command center in 2011 was remarkable. The number is expected to grow even more in the coming year. The familiar use of marketing services agencies is slowly replaced by the more advanced, and more effective use of social media.

There are also big expectations on the issue of security in 2012. Organizations have started the extensive use of mobile devices in data management, which increases security risks. Given this scenario, analysts say that organizations have to learn to compromise with technology. They have to expect data breaches to happen anytime, and corporate networks have to be always prepared for any form of malicious attack that may be brought about by such breaches. With the increasing number of employee-owned devices comes the increase in the number of data leakage points.

Through technology, corporate information is made more accessible from anywhere. Mobile devices are extensively used by employees who have access to such data. Nowadays, the personal computer is being used as an additional major corporate tool. It has also given way to “personal cloud” that uses mobile and web applications. Everyone expects that new and bigger happenings will take place in the world of IT in 2012.

Then, targeted advertising was popularized by companies that use this collected personal information. They have accumulated so much of it that they could build profiles of users, especially when it comes to their product preferences. Immediately, privacy advocates cautioned users to be more prudent when sharing their personal data. Despite intensive consumer education, privacy issues got worse, and problems cropped up.

Sometime later, many websites presented their privacy policies without hiding anything. They gave users the option of whether or not to share their personal information. There are those websites that honestly tell their users the purpose of collecting this information. However, technology is continuously improving and more subtle ways of data gathering are being invented.

One of the latest of these technologies is Amazon’s Silk Web Browser. This is not exactly new because Opera has already been using this same technology for years. The Silk Web Browser is intended to be used with Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. With this, users can surf the internet at optimized speed, giving them a different experience than they had with their previous browsers. On its own servers, Amazon optimizes and compresses every page that users visit, thereby increasing speed and hastening load times.

It is here where privacy concerns again come into play. Amazon can collect and store information about users’ surfing habits. This is because every page that users visit goes through Amazon’s servers. Amazon would be able to record the kinds of sites visited, how much time users spend on them, and what they do there.

The company was asked by Congress to answer the questions that they posed. On Amazon’s side, a representative said that data collected will be anonymous. In addition, users can opt to turn off this feature, if they wish. In the end, users will be the ones to decide whether or not they will share their information with Amazon. They just have to choose between either surfing at faster speeds by allowing their personal information to be collected and used for other purposes, or to not provide information and surf at slower speeds.

By storing information on the Internet, it made their consumer’s data vulnerable.  The problem is, these monolithic computers were safe and secure, while the Internet wasn’t nearly as secure. The Internet can be easily hacked into, while these massive computers and their networks had so many privacy and safety safeguards that the N.S.A. would have had trouble trying to break in. The fact is though, the consumer’s lost this battle. While it helped out the big shot companies by removing their burden of network management, it hurt the consumers by having their security decreased by a large amount, and put their information at risk. “Cloud Computing” is the term put to this in discrepant practice of putting all information on the web rather than the large personal databases.

This creates a big privacy issue for the customers though. Since these people on the Internet have no affiliation with the company who has asked them to store the data, who is to say they are going to take their job seriously and provide these users with adequate protection? Also, it isn’t like they are being paid a large sum of money to do so either, online data storage prices are dirt cheap and will remain that way, as space is virtually unlimited.

There isn’t much that can be done about these data infringements and the risk that these companies represent to you, but there are things you can do as an individual and an Internet user. Try and restrict the amount of sensitive information you give these companies. If they are going to treat it well, don’t give it to the at all! Also, try using an anonymous proxy that will encrypt and encode all of your data. While these companies will let your Internet safety go by the wayside, you can ensure anonymous browsing through a private proxy server.