“Though shadowing is more art than science, it’s crucial to making progress when working on big data. … But if you choose exactly the right angle, it’s possible to obscure the legally and ethically sensitive parts of the original dataset while retaining much of its extraordinary power.”
[Uncharted, Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michael]
In Plato’s cave, the prisoners can see not the original things but the shadows on the wall. Hence, the prisoners realized these shadows as reality. Due to the location of the fire, the prisoner can see the shadows close to reality or the biased image.
In Big Data, sometimes, we cannot access the original (and raw) data due to ethical and legal issues. Hence, data scientists always consider where we put the light for “appropriate” shadow. These data shadows may provide a lot of discoveries about our world without the invasion of privacy.
Everybody makes DATA 