Those of us that work with data tend to take the integrity of it very seriously. We work hard to ensure that we clean data properly, store and manipulate it in ways the keep it's meaning valid, and take pride in delivering results to queries that are useful to our clients.
I would like to think that most DBAs are very concerned about any threat to the integrity of their data. That they are very concerned the information returned from queries is in some way not accurate and they go to great lengths to try and ensure that things are as valid as possible. Even though "garbage in, garbage out" has been a saying in technology for decades, many DBAs do their best to prevent garbage.
In our internal systems one would think that it is probably fairly easy to ensure our data is intact, but is it really easy?
One of the things that has become incredibly popular over the last 3 or 4 years is the rise of social networking with various places like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and others. These sites work by making connections between us and allowing us to develop these online relationships with many other people. In general I think it's a great thing for people to be able to share if they want to, and there's a lot of power in bringing together people from very different walks of life.
But the data provided by people isn't often verified, or it's not well verified.Social networking hacks are appearing, and I'm sure we'll see more and more over time. If we can't even accept blog comments in many places without tremendous amounts of unnecessary, irrelevant, and offensive comments, I'm sure that we'll have more and more trouble with social networks.
There is something that concerns me. As we link more and more systems together, we get feeds from many places, and we start to place some value on this data, we start to place some level of trust in its validity. And that's a dangerous thing to do when it's possible that anyone could setup a profile that's either entirely fictional or misrepresents another person.
And since I can see this data being used for everything from deciding whether to interview or hire someone to risk assessment for financial matters, or even as part of our business intelligence or data mining applications. And I really believe that more and more of us will be scraping, linking, or having this data somehow filter into our CRM and other sales related systems.
But if we can't trust it, does it have any value? I'm not sure it does, and that's a little disheartening. Social networking ideas are popular, and there's some inherent value in that. They're built on a very positive premise of interconnecting people in new ways, and it's a shame to see them exploited by those with malicious intent.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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