Usama Fayyad’s colleagues say he battles monsters for a living. In the elite engineering circles that this former NASA rocket scientist inhabits, the job description passes for a wisecrack. But, like many jokes, there’s truth behind it.
Fayyad is Yahoo!’s chief data officer, possibly the first person to hold such a position. His role since he took the post in December, 2004, has been to make both sense and money from the vast amounts of information Yahoo collects on the doings of 500 million people who visit its site every month.
Each day, Yahoo collects between 12 and 15 terabytes of data. This vast store includes the search keywords people type, the Yahoo pages they visit, the ads they click, the videos they watch, and even whether they scroll all the way down to the bottom of an article.
Yahoo’s daily data collection exceeds the digital size of the entire Library of Congress. A single terabyte alone is so massive that computer scientists named it after teras, the Greek word for “monster” — hence the humor in Fayyad’s job description. “We used to call them ‘terrorbytes,'” says Fayyad.
The ‘Data Wars’
Lately, the tongue-in-cheek explanation of Fayyad’s employ seems more apt that ever. Fayyad, along with a growing number of executives at other companies who also oversee reams of data collected on their Web sites, are engaged in a major battle over how freely that information can be used to tailor ads to individuals. The monster, as even Fayyad sees it, is the potential to misuse the data — violating consumer privacy in the name of personalization and profits. “Humanity as a whole hasn’t figured out how to deal with this,” says Fayyad.
The battle came to a head recently with Web users and government regulators becoming involved like never before. On Dec. 5, Facebook…