National Bestseller
“No other book offers such an accessible and balanced tour of the many benefits and downsides of our continuing infatuation with data.”—Wall Street Journal
“What I’m certain about is that Big Data will be the defining text in the discussion for some time to come.”—Forbes.com It seems like “big data” is in the news every day, with new examples of how powerful algorithms are teasing out the hidden connections between seemingly unrelated things. Whether it is used by the NSA to fight terrorism or by online retailers to predict customers’ buying patterns, big data is a revolution occurring around us, in the process of forever changing economics, science, culture, and the very way we think. But it also poses new threats, from the end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.
Big Data is the first big book about this earthshaking subject, with two leading experts explaining what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards.

In Los Angeles, a remarkable experiment is underway; the police are trying to predict crime, before it even happens.
At the heart of the city of London, one trader believes that he has found the secret of making billions with maths. In South Africa, astronomers are attempting to catalogue the entire cosmos. These very different worlds are united by one thing - an extraordinary explosion in data.
Horizon meets the people at the forefront of the data revolution, and reveals the possibilities and the promise of the age of big data.