The Snapchat data breach exposed 4.6 million user names, phone numbers and the hacker published the database online. Snapchat team had no comments to add about their data breach despite numerous warnings from their IT team regarding a likely cyber attack.
The company has publicly stated that its new update will prevent another data breach from happening again. Also the update will allow users to opt out of the Find Friends system, which would prevent others from looking up account information through address books. However, doing this will no longer allow users to appear in results when others seek to match their address book numbers with potential Snapchat friends.
Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram are forcing their presence online causing a tremendous boom in social media. At the present moment they are trying to keep silent in regards to their data breach problems and cyber threats. However, CNN covered a story in December indicating that Facebook, Twitter and Gmail experienced a data breach, where 2 million passwords were stolen.
Regardless of the fact that data breach problems seem to be common today, social media has become a major data source for retail companies. The idea behind this is simply that enterprises are able to get immediate feedback about their new products and services.
With the rapidly growing presence of social media all over the web, comes along a high demand for tracking user interactions and web mentions on such sites. The positive trend that is emerging from this though, is that social media increases the amount of data for enterprises.
In turn, this increase in social media is the root cause driving the growth of the Global Big Data Market in the Retail Sector in the coming years, which analysts predict will grow at a CAGR of 33.14 percent in the period 2014-2018.
Although, the big data market in the retail sector is expected to see strong growth, cyber attacks like the one on Snapchat are likely to continue and this will fuel future data breach attempts and cause privacy issues.
This type of market challenge may certainly not seem like a big deal now, but when large and complex datasets become difficult to manage using conventional database management tools, companies turn to big data solutions, which are used for the storage and analysis of big data.
Big data, often seen in the form of unstructured and semi-structured, is often generated in organizations on a daily basis and their sources include; financial markets, e-mail messages, photographic images, activity logs, web server log data, tweets, status messages, likes, follows and e-commerce transactions.
You can thus see that a data breach within a corporation becomes of strong concern for corporations all across the globe and this is affecting the Global Big Data in the Retail Sector as well.
Because of a large amount of enterprise data becoming digital, vital issues such as privacy, data breach, liability, and protection of intellectual property have started emerging in the big data market. As a result, data security and data privacy have become a major concern for some social media giants when dealing with data breach attacks.
The vendors in this market are handling sensitive client information and hence many enterprises are concerned about another data breach-taking place. On top of handling confidential financial information, vendors also collect highly sensitive consumer information. So it is important to be aware of data breach trends taking place within the social media space and how this negatively affects the growth of the big data market.
For more information, view our 2014-2018 report on the Global Big Data Market in the Retail Sector.
You might also be interested in:
- Global Smart Process Application Market 2014-2018
- Global Carbon Accounting Software Market 2014-2018
- Global Business Intelligence (BI) Market in Retail Industry 2014-2018
