In many ways it has come to mean surveillance-as-a-service. Big Data usually means, “we want monitoring, logging & tracking at a scale large enough to cope with surveillance data ingestion rates.”

There are remarkably few instances of actual “big data” problems, at least in the commercial sector, that aren’t merely surveillance.

As a machine learning engineer myself, this is somewhat of an existential crisis. It truly makes quant finance look like one of the most ethically positive career choices left.