‘Big data is people!’ The sum of our clickstreams is not an objective measure of who we are, but a personal portrait of our hopes and desires <https://aeon.co/essays/why-big-data-is-actually-small-personal-and-very-huma...> [] Most definitions of big data don’t take account of its inherent humanness, nor do they grapple meaningfully with its implications for the relationship between technology and changing ways of defining ourselves. What makes new collections of data different, and therefore significant, is their quality of being generated continuously from people’s mundane, scarcely thought-through, seemingly tiny actions such as Tweets, Facebook likes, Twitches, Google searches, online comments, one-click purchases, even viewing-but-skipping-over a photograph in your feed – along with the intimacy of these actions. They are ‘faint images of me’ (to borrow a phrase from William Gibson’s description of massed data traces), lending ghostly new life to the fruits of algorithmic processing. Examples of the production sites of such data, as the geographer Rob Kitchin recently cataloged them, include the recording of retail purchases; digital devices that save and communicate the history of their own use (such as mobile phones); the logging of transactions and interactions across digital networks (eg email or online banking); clickstream data that record navigation through a website or app; measurements from sensors embedded into objects or environments; the scanning of machine-readable objects such as travel passes or barcodes; ‘automotive telematics’ produced by drivers; and social-media postings. These sources are producing massive, dynamic flows of diverse, fine-grained, relational data. [] Continuously assembled trails of data derived from all those inputs are quickly being put to use. Data streams can feed maps that tell you not just where you are but also where you want to go; they can, as well, fuel preemptive police work – that is, programs that focus investigations based on patterns discerned in data before a subject has committed a crime. Big data is people, then, in two senses. It is made up of our clickstreams and navigational choices; and it in turn makes up many socially significant policies and even self-definitions, allegiances, relationships, choices, categories. Some cultural critics call what is emerging a ‘new mind control’ capable of flipping major elections. Others describe a form of rapacious human engineering. Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School argues that the harnessing of behavioural data is having massively disruptive results on freedom, privacy, moral reasoning and autonomy – results that will be playing out for decades to come. In her view, it is nothing less than a virulent new form of capitalism. The momentum of big-data definitions tends to reinforce the impression that big data is devoid of subjectivity, or of any human point of view at all. A set of social-science scholars working in the field of technology studies recently urged researchers to turn from ‘data-centred’ to ‘people-centred’ methods, arguing that too much focus on a data-driven approach neglects the human being who is at the core of sociological studies. This reminder, however useful, neglects the central fact that data traces are made up of people. []