Data breaches are highly damaging for both the company and its consumers. This interactive bubble chart depicts the biggest data breaches that occurred. The bubbles represent the different companies which faced data breaches. This visualization has a time scale as the y-axis where the breaches are categorized according to the year it occurred. The visualization also provides more elements to filter and categorize the data. For example, the bubble color and the bubble size which have 2 mutually exclusive indicators called ‘year’, ‘method of leak’ and ‘no of records stolen’, ‘data sensitivity’ respectively.
Things I liked:
- Firstly, by the time scale, we can easily identify that the number of data breaches has drastically increased over the years which raised a lot of concerns.
- Secondly, the visualization portrays a complete picture of the data breaches and covers every aspect ranging from the method of the leak to the sensitivity level of data.
- Thirdly, hovering over each bubble provides details of the breach and on clicking first time it provides a summary of the event, but on clicking the second time it redirects to the actual news article.
- We can select any combination of the four categorizing indicators mentioned above.
- A legend provides filtering options based on the type of industry and the type of data leak.
Things that can be improved:
- The color range used for depicting ‘year’ is very subtle and distinguishing is difficult.
- Attention diverts to the ones in orange which is predefined as an interesting story.
Reference: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/