26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

Big data has become one of the most prominent technologies over the past years in all science and technology domains and has been everywhere applied in industries and organizations. Big data analytics helps for increasing executive efficiency and effectiveness, speeding up decision making, identifying new trends, developing new products, providing services, and generating revenue. Big data analytics allow users to extract useful information from a large amount of structured and/or unstructured raw data and gain deeper insight for decision making. However, it has faced the challenges in ethics, legal, privacy, and security (ELPS) issue to the general public. Many side effects have accompanied with the benefits of big data applications. It is worthwhile to review what have been done and what’s missing in social concerns in the literature of big data. We retrieve 2416 relevant articles over 2006 to 2016 from database Scopus via using the keywords “big data”, “cloud computing”, “legal”, “ethic*”, “privacy” , and “security” to search the fields of title, author keywords, and abstract. A citation network among these 2416 articles is built. We apply the main path analysis to analyze the citation network and identify the overall development trajectory of ethics, legal, privacy, and security issues in different fields. We also adopt the cluster analysis and word clouding techniques to explore the major topics that have been discussed by researchers on ELPS. We found that privacy preserving is the hottest topic among ELPS. Many privacy concerns are disclosed on the processes of data storage, data transmission, and data sharing. Various techniques of anonymization, encryption and authentication are proposed to keep the data security and preserve customers’ privacy. Big data can bring benefits in various fields, such as healthcare, mobile, smart grid, traffic management, retail, payments, and online. However, big data also carries big concerns and challenges to the human being. Therefore, the solutions should be worked out to balance the benefits and risks of the big data applications. The concerns in big data include profiling, tracking, discrimination, government surveillance, and loss of control. To cope with such complex issues, laws and regulations must be enforced with clear-cut boundaries in terms of unauthorized access, data sharing, misuse, and reproduction of personal information. The results concluded indicate that there are a lot of efforts should be done to maximize the benefits of big data applications and minimize its potential harm.