Security and Privacy Challenges in Big Data

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the field of Big Data thanks to its benefits, such as cost optimization, improved efficiency, and potential risks identification. Big data has become a widely exploited research area in academia and industry as it benefits both organizations and consumers. However, like any new technology, there are still several challenges relevant to this field and most notably data security. The security challenges of individual’s sensitive information associated with Big Data have been widely studied in the literature. In addition, current studies of Big Data mainly focus on how to minimize the privacy risk brought by Big Data operations; however, unwanted disclosure of the user’s sensitive information may also happen in the process of data collection and analysis. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the security and privacy issues related to Big Data from a wider perspective and investigate various mechanisms that can be used to protect sensitive information and thus, achieve better data security.