Recommended reading about abuses of big data algorithms that make the wrong assumptions:
The Uses And Misuses Of ‘Big Data’: A Conversation
“data should work in service of human beings, not the other way around.”
And -
Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
“O’Neil is an ideal person to write this book. She is an academic mathematician turned Wall Street quant turned data scientist who has been involved in Occupy Wall Street and recently started an algorithmic auditing company. She is one of the strongest voices speaking out for limiting the ways we allow algorithms to influence our lives… While Weapons of Math Destruction is full of hard truths and grim statistics, it is also accessible and even entertaining. O’Neil’s writing is direct and easy to read—I devoured it in an afternoon.”
— Scientific American
“Cathy O’Neil has seen Big Data from the inside, and the picture isn’t pretty. Weapons of Math Destruction opens the curtain on algorithms that exploit people and distort the truth while posing as neutral mathematical tools. This book is wise, fierce, and desperately necessary.”
— Jordan Ellenberg, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of How Not To Be Wrong
“O’Neil has become [a whistle-blower] for the world of Big Data… [in] her important new book… Her work makes particularly disturbing points about how being on the wrong side of an algorithmic decision can snowball in incredibly destructive ways.”
—TIME
Garbage in, garbage out is the same thing no matter how large the data sets involved