Keeping Tabs on Big Tech

David Schweidel is Rebecca Cheney McGreevy Endowed Chair and Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School and an expert in the areas of customer relationship management and social media analytics. His research focuses on the development and application of statistical models to understand customer behavior and inform managerial decisions. David has extensively leveraged AWS at Emory in his research including projects focused on language generation, social network analyses, and search engine optimization (SEO) studies. One of his latest and most fascinating efforts explores the complex data privacy issues associated with Apple iOS updates. 

“We collaborated with a mobile location analytics firm recently to investigate the impact of Apple’s update to its iOS data privacy policy,” says David. “The firm provided us with 100 days of data that contained all the mobile location data it collected from more than 10 million devices. Compressed, the data included approximately 100 million observations and exceeded a terabyte in size. It was transferred to us and stored in an AWS S3 bucket while all calculations were performed on AWS EC2. Thanks to the AWS at Emory platform, we were not hindered by local resource constraints. From start to finish, our analysis was completed in less than four weeks.” 

David’s exploration of how Big Tech handles our personal data and the impacts of their ever-changing agreements and software updates is only the latest example of how he continues to push the limits of his research in the cloud. Without the limitations associated with being tied to resources physically within arm’s reach, he continues to amaze the faculty and staff here at Emory and beyond.