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Data now mediate our day-to-day social relationships to an unprecedented degree, due to the proliferation of new data collection and analysis tools that allow individuals to easily track, quantify, and communicate information about our own behaviors and those of others. This type of big data arguably touches more of us more directly than the big data practices more commonly discussed, as it comes to reshape our relationships across multiple domains. This flavor of big data, which I term relational, is collected and analyzed by individuals, inhabiting social roles (as parents, friends, etc.) as a means for negotiating social life. In other words, we can understand big data not simply as a methodological watershed, but as a fundamental social shift in how people manage relationships and make choices, with complex implications for privacy, trust, and dynamics of interpersonal control.In this Essay, I flesh out the idea of relational big data by describing its conceptual predecessor in economic sociology. I suggest a few domains in which data mediate social relationships and how interactions might change around it. I then consider what analytical purchase this flavor of big data gets us regarding questions of policy in the age of ubiquitous computing.
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