All of this may sound purely commercial, but elsewhere big data is being used to different ends. Washington-headquartered technology consulting firm Aristotle, for instance, aggregates data on voters from various public and commercial sources and puts together demographic profiles which are then used by political parties.

Its technology was used in the recent U.S. presidential elections and by the PDP Party in Tunisia in 2011–the first democratic elections held in the country following the Arab Spring uprising. It's also worth noting that the now famous American statistician Nate Silver, who correctly predicted the results of the last US presidential elections, found notoriety using not intuition, but big data.

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