Proponents of the "big data" phenomenon like to talk about its promise and how it will revolutionize research and science as we know it. What isn’t talked about is how some of the byproducts of big data can put folks in compromising situations, especially when taking into account the contemporary phenomenon of social media.

One of the key tenets of big data is that computing capabilities have advanced to where we can store and process large amounts of information. No longer will we have to deal with sample sizes, correcting for outliers, or even structure.

This allows folks to gather data from a variety of sources, including social media sources like Facebook, Twitter (and other so-called microblogs from other countries which most Americans have not even heard of), message boards and the like.

Already, numerous organizations mine these social media sites for marketing purposes. For example, tweets about a particular product help to determine its success. Numerous positive tweets, from a varied number of sources, could indicate popularity, while frequent negative tweets might indicate a need to improve the product.

Businesses and government agencies around the world are thus trying to improve their social media data-gathering skills, storing that data (lots of it) and running analyses against it. Sound harmless? Mostly.

However, there have been recent rumors of popular social media sites being compromised by foreign governments. Such agencies use big-data techniques of gathering large amounts of data and running analyses against this data. By using these techniques, the story goes, these foreign governments were able to identify numerous members of elite U.S. military groups.

While the story may or may not be true, the fact of the matter is that such elite groups are discouraging, if not forbidding, their members from establishing a social media presence.

This has far-reaching implications even for the average Joe on the street. Even if you’re not a SEAL, ranger or spy, your privacy can be severely compromised.

We’re not talking about the lolos who post pictures or brag about committing crimes on their Facebook page. But wouldn’t you be concerned if anyone could figure out, with a couple of clicks of a mouse, where you live, when you’re not home, what kind of valuables you have? With big data this is entirely a plausible premise.

Sure it may sound like paranoia, but you should be on the safe side. Remember that the default setting of most social media sites is not very secure. Further, folks should think twice before putting sensitive information on such sites.

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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. Reach him at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.