5 Examples of Bad Data Quality in Business — And How to Avoid Them

Sarah is a content strategist and writer at Monte Carlo.

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Bad data quality is when data is inaccurate, missing, or unreliable, which can lead to what we call data downtime, which can negatively impact operations and decision-making.

According to our annual survey, the number of data downtime incidents has nearly doubled year over year. This can be attributed to a 166% increase in the time it takes to resolve data quality issues.

But when data downtime occurs, what does it actually mean for your organization? What is a data quality incident, and what are the business consequences?

You ask. We've compiled five of the most egregious data quality stories from recent years to summarize what happened, how it impacted the business, and how leaders responded.

And because we're optimistic that data issues can be stopped before they cause the damage that generates these headlines, we've also provided three best practices to help your team improve data quality across your organization.

But before that, some Schadenfreude.

Table of Contents

1. Unity Technologies’ $110M Ad Targeting Error

Unity Technologies, known for its popular real-time 3D content platform, suffered a significant data quality incident in the first quarter of 2022. The company's Audience Pinpoint tool, designed to help game developers target and acquire players and advertise to them, ingested bad data from a large customer, causing major inaccuracies in the training set of its predictive ML algorithms and subsequent poor performance.

As a result, Unity's revenue sharing model took a direct hit, resulting in a loss of approximately $110 million. According to CEO John Ricciello, this figure included:

• Direct impact on revenue
• Recovery-related costs to rebuild and retrain models
• Delayed launch of new revenue-driving features as the company prioritized resolving data quality issues.

Ultimately, Unity's stock price fell 37%, with reports that investors had "lost confidence" in the company's strategy (and CEO). Richtero has promised to get the situation under control, telling shareholders that it has "monitoring, alerting and recovery systems and processes in place to rapidly mitigate any future complex data issues."

In other words, Unity's leadership understood that it was necessary to level up focus on data quality. Especially when an advertising campaign is involved, it is extremely important to have reliable and reliable data to lead the bidding strategy to success and maintain the performance for a long time.

2. Equifax’s Ongoing Inaccurate Credit Score Fiasco

From March 17 to April 6, 2022, Equifax is incorrectly credit for millions of consumers who have applied for automobile loans, mortgages, and credit cards to major financing companies such as JPMORGAN CHASE and WELLS FARGO. Published a score. For more than 300, 000 individuals, the credit score was more than 20 points, which affected interest rates and rejected loan applications.

Equeifax's leaders have accurately accused the "coding problem" in the legacy o n-premises server. According to some sources to the NATIONALMORTGAGEPROFESSIL. COM, specific attribute values, such as the number of inquiries within one month and the age of the oldest trading line, were inaccurate.

Equifax's stock price dropped by about 5 % in the aftermath of exposure by Wall Street Journal. A few days later, Equifax was in a collective lawsuit led by Florida residents, after EQUIFAX told the financians that her credit score was 130 points lower than the original.

And Equeifax did not have enough social trust or favor. In 2017, Equ i-Fax was charged with the negligence of security practices that led to larg e-scale data leakage that leaked the date, address, and social security number of about 150 million consumers. He agreed to the reconciliation.

The company's official statement describes the countermeasures in detail: "Accelerated the environmental transition to the Equifax cloud and monitor additional management and monitoring to detect and prevent similar problems in the future. Will be provided.

The quality of data is important for all businesses, but when financial decisions are made, information reliability, accuracy, and safety are absolutely indispensable. How much damage to three weeks of data downtime has caused EQUIFAX needs to be settled in a group lawsuit.

3. Uber’s $45M Driver Payment Miscalculation

In 2017, it was reported that Uber was incorrectly calculating commissions and had to pay some of the New York drivers for their legitimate income. Uber was collecting commissions based on the total fare, instead of calculating the commission based on the consumption tax and the pure fare deducted from the other fees. In other words, for two and a half years, Uber has collected 2. 6 % from 2. 6 % of the driver than recognized by its own rules.

Uber's leader reported that all the affected drivers had repaid their revenue and 9 % per year. The Wall Street Journal estimates that the cost is at least $ 45 million, as the drivers of tens of thousands have been paid.

Like Equi Fax, Uber was already dealing with dissatisfied drivers when the incident became public. Even in 2017 alone, the driver's estimated income was settled for $ 20 million, and the CEO at the time was unsightly as his own Uber Driver about the declining income. The argument is taken in the dash cam video.

In this specific case, Uber's data itself was not inaccurate, but the company calculated it completely wrong. In order to maintain fair business practices, it is extremely important for all teams to maintain data transparency and visibility.

4. Samsung’s $105B “Fat Finger” Data Entry Error

In April 2018, Samsung Securities (Samsung Production's Stock Trading Division) accidentally distributed about $ 105 billion shares to employees.

Instead of paying a dividend equivalent to 2. 8 billion won (about $ 2. 1 million), the employee had mistakenly input to "shares" instead of "won". As a result, 2. 8 billion shares (equivalent to $ 105 billion) were issued to employees at the holding association.

It took 37 minutes to notice the situation and prevent employees from selling the wrong "ghost shares". However, in the meantime, 16 employees sold 5 million shares (equivalent to about $ 187 million).

There are many big numbers here, but Samsung Securities's substantial management costs are as follows:

• The stock price has fallen by nearly 12 %, and the market capitalization has fallen by about $ 300 million.
• He lost his relationship with major customers, including the largest pension fund in Korea.
• Prohibition of new customers from financial regulation authorities for 6 months
• Ku Sung Hoon Joint CEO resigns

Human errors occur. However, in the financial fields, especially in the financial fields that are in danger of investors and partners, it is necessary to take measures to detect larg e-scale mistakes in real time and reduce them.

5. Public Health England’s Unreported COVID-19 Cases

In the fall of 2020, the COVID-19 infected persons in the UK rely on contact tracers to notify the individual infected with viruses. However, between September 25 and October 2, 15, 841 positive cases have completely disappeared from the daily reports of the English Health Bureau.

This is due to "technical error", in short, PHE developers used the old XLS instead of the latest XLSX of the Excel file format. In this old format, PHE's reported templates could only save about 65, 000 lines, about 1, 400 data. However, the CSV files submitted by other companies to PHE contained more data. In other words, thousands of Cobid cases were completely missed from the reports created by PHE, published it as an official number of cases, and shared with contact tracers.

What is the final price of this data missing? It is possible that more than 50, 000 potential infections have never noticed that they were exposed to COVID-19 and have been living in their daily lives, overlooked by contact tracers. This can be a fatal mistake during this period, when there were no vaccines or effective treatments.

When the incident occurred, PHE was already planning to replace the legacy software and upgrade to a data analysis tool that is more suitable for work than Excel. However, a very unfortunate case study, which is missing this data, indicates how important the data is in medical decisio n-making and crisis management.

How businesses can prevent data downtime

Million dollars, the status of leaders, social credit, life and life: In cases of such poor data quality, it indicates that data downtime can affect the soundness of the entire business. is.

The good news is that organizations can take an aggressive approach to minimize data quality problems, and can respond more quickly if the problem occurs. Here are some of the best practices that the data team can implement in order to take the lead in data downtime.

Testing for data quality

The data test helps the team to verify data assumptions and systematically verify data accuracy, completeness, and consistency. Data tests do not cover all scenarios, but helps catch specific issues that can occur in data pipelines.

The types of general data quality tests include:

• Unit test: A automatic test that detects whether the data passing through the pipeline looks as expected. In the unit test, you can evaluate the freshness of the data, detect the null value, and check if all the value in the column is within a specific range.
• Integrated test: A test method to verify that data from a variety of sources is loaded, integrated, and converted according to the set business rules.

By testing data early and frequently, general quality problems can be detected before affecting downstream data users and products.

Data governance for structured data management

Data governance frameworks help the team standardize and document how to manage, use and protect data in the organization. By outlining important practices such as data ownership and accountability, data governance answers questions about the person who can access the data, the location of data, how to collect and process data, and the timing of disposal of data.

Data governance also includes data quality standards that define accuracy, integrity, and consistent benchmarks. All teams agree on what data quality is, allowing you to continue working to confirm that all data meets these standards.

Data observability to ensure real-time reliability

Data tests and data governance are important and active measures that the organization should take to minimize the effects of data downtime due to the known pr e-defined data quality issues. However, not only known issues but also unknown issues, to visualize the soundness of the en d-t o-end of the data pipeline, provides the most comprehensive and scalable solution for data observation.

Data of the Beyrility provides automatic monitoring and tracking of data quality across the entire data stack, and occurs when problems such as incorrect data, incorrect data, obsolete data, and completely missing data. Give a warning to the team. Excellent Obsbeyrability tools include data lineage that supports troubleshooting and quick response to incidents, and what is a problem and which downstream data assets are at risk. You can identify accurately.

By identifying in real time when abnormalities or a deviation from the predicted data patterns occur, companies can avoid huge costs due to data quality incidents.

Prioritizing data quality for the success of your business

Organizations today rely more on data than ever before to make decisions. We've already seen how poor data quality around advertising campaigns, financial products, consumer payments, employee equity, public health reporting, and more has cost companies millions of dollars and damaged professional and personal reputations for years to come.

But disastrous data quality issues aren't inevitable. Leading teams are adopting data testing, data governance, and data observability solutions to prevent data downtime and improve trust in data across their organizations.

Ready to start your data quality journey? See how observability comes to life with our free walkthrough of the Monte Carlo Platform.

Android requirements and compatibility

Before you start developing Android applications with Unity, review Unity's requirements and compatibility information for Android and learn about limitations for developing Unity applications for this platform.

Android support

Unity supports Android 5. 1 "Lollipop" (API level 22) and above. See AndroidSdkVersions for more information.

Graphics API support

Android devices support Vulkan and OpenGL ES. This section provides information about the graphics APIs that Unity supports on Android.

Graphics API	Support
Vulkan	Supported
OpenGL ES 1. 0	No
OpenGL ES 1. 1	No
OpenGL ES 2. 0	Yes (1)
OpenGL ES 3. 0	Supported
OpenGL ES 3. 1	Supported
OpenGL ES 3. 2	Supported

Note:

1. New Unity projects do not support OpenGL ES 2. 0 by default. See OpenGL ES 2. 0 for information on how to add support for OpenGL ES 2. 0.

OpenGL ES 2.0

Unity does not include OpenGL ES 2. 0 in its built-in set of graphics APIs for Android by default. To add support for OpenGL ES 2. 0:

1. Go to Edit > Project Settings.
2. In the Project Settings window, select the Player tab and open the Android Player Settings:
3. Open "Other Settings". In the Rendering section, disable Auto Graphics API. This will display the Graphics API list.
4. To add support for OpenGL ES 2. 0, select Add (+) and select OpenGLES2.

If you upgrade an older project that uses the Auto Graphics API to a Unity version that doesn't include OpenGL ES 2. 0 by default, Unity will disable Auto Graphics API and manually add OpenGL ES 2. 0 to the list.

Render pipeline compatibility

Not all render pipelines are a set of operations that take the content of a Scene and display it on the screen. In Unity, you can choose from pre-built render pipelines or write your own. See the Glossary for more information. Not compatible with Android due to hardware and graphics API limitations.

Features	Built-in render pipeline	Universal Rendering Pipeline	High-Resolution Render Pipeline	Scriptable Custom Rendering Pipeline
Android	Supported	Supported	No	Supported

Manifest element attributes

This section contains compatibility information for the attributes of the Android App Manifest element.

• For this element, Unity supports only singleTask launchMode.

Emulator compatibility

Unity does not support the Android emulator.

• To test your application
• Test on an Android device.
• If you only want to test the mobile input of your application, use Unity Remote. It is a downloadable app designed to assist with Android, iOS, and tvOS development. This app connects with Unity while you run your project in Play mode from the Unity Editor. For more information, see the Glossary.

Texture compression

If you only want to test the appearance of an Android device, use the Device Simulator.

Standard texture compression A method of storing data that reduces the amount of storage required. See texture compression, animation compression, audio compression, build compression. Android formats include Ericsson Texture Compression (ETC) and Adaptable Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC). Use one of these texture compressions to target the widest range of Android devices. 3D Graphics hardware requires textures to be compressed in a special format optimized for fast texture sampling. See the Glossary Formats for more information. Unity's default texture compression format is ASTC. If an Android device does not support the texture compression format you want to use for your textures, Unity will decompress the texture at runtime. This increases memory usage and slows down rendering.

A subset of Android devices supports the DXT and PVRTC texture compression formats. These formats support high compression and high image quality as well as textures with alpha channels. For digital distribution services that filter content based on texture compression format, it is a best practice to create separate builds of your application for each texture compression format.

• There are two ways to change the default texture compression format for your application:
• Set the texture compression format in Android Player Settings.

Set Texture Compression in Android Build Settings. The default value is Use Player Settings, a setting that allows you to set various player-specific options for the final game built with Unity. See the Glossary for more information.

The values ​​set in Build Settings have priority over values ​​set in Player Settings. Use this to change the texture compression format of a specific build.

Playing video files

You can also customize the texture compression format of individual textures. The values ​​set for each texture overwrite the platfor m-specific settings that can set the resolution, file size, related memory size requirements, pixel dimensions, and quality for each target platform. For the default value of the texture compression format, see the terms collection. For information on how to change the texture format, see the default value of the Texture Compression Format. File format for processing textures during rea l-time rendering with 3D graphics hardware such as graphics cards and mobile devices. For more information, see the texture importer in the terms of each texture.

• This section provides additional information to play video files on Android:
• To play video files on Android, use the Video Player component. If the application tries to play a video file that is not supported by the device, Unity does not play the video.
• As long as the target device is supported, you can use any resolution and the number of audio channels. Note: Not all devices support more than 640 x 360 resolutions.
• Unity supports regeneration from no n-compressed asset bundles. If you have Android Pie or higher, Unity supports the playback from the compressed asset bundle.
• Unity does not support native webm/VP8 transparency. To regenerate the VP8 encoded WebM clip with transparency, transcode the clip to the format that supports the clip.
• In the Android version before 6. 0. 1, transparent videos with higher resolutions than the resolution supported by the device render pixels. Pixel is the minimum unit of computer images. Pixel size depends on the resolution of the screen. Pixel lighting is calculated for each pixel of the screen. For more information, see the outer resolution of the supported resolution as white.

Foldable Device Features with Unity and Unreal Engine 4

Unity reports the problem of format compatibility with ADB Logcat output and attaches AndroidVideoMedia in front of them. This file may display other devic e-specific error messages near the problem of the video format reported by Unity. These devic e-specific errors are not displayed in Unity and often explain what the compatibility is.

App Continuity and Multi-Window Mode

Folding technology for mobile is a groundbreaking experience for users as well as developers. With many form factors such as immersive displays, app continuity, Flex mode, UX optimization, developers are forced to think outside the box to adapt to this technology. Many blogs have already talked about general application considerations, but what about gaming on foldable devices? In this blog, we look at the challenges and new opportunities that foldable devices bring to mobile game development. This blog focuses on Unity and Unreal Engine, the most popular game engines for mobile development. However, a lot of the information applies to other engines as well.

First, let's review that the larger internal display is called the main display and the smaller external display is called the cover display.

App Continuity

App continuity and multi-window mode are two important features of foldable smartphones. App continuity allows you to seamlessly transition from the cover display to the main display without having to reopen the app. Multi-window allows you to run multiple apps at once, enabling multitasking like never before.

Moving apps between the two displays affects the size, density, and aspect ratio of the displays you can use. App Continuity can be enabled/disabled from your app's Android Manifest: element has a new attribute called resizeableActivity.

If not set, this attribute defaults to true, so App Continuity is enabled and your app is assumed to fully support both App Continuity and multi-window mode. When set to true, your application will automatically try to resize when moving between displays, as shown in the video below.

If set to false, the transition from cover display to main display is allowed, but the application will not resize. Instead, a new button will appear, allowing the user to restart the application at a time of their choosing.

Continue on Cover Screen

When your app transitions between two displays, the activity will be destroyed and recreated. Therefore, you should use it to save your app's data and restore its previous state. From my testing, it seems that both Unity and Unreal Engine already handle this. However, if you are developing in a custom engine, it is worth checking if your engine/app can handle this.

By default, foldable devices only lock the device when the main display is closed. However, it is possible for users to disable this feature with a specific app.

The device display settings have an option called "Continue on the cover screen" that the user needs to enable. Entering this menu displays all applications on the device, and users can set a specific application so that they do not lock the device when closing the main display.

Multi-Window Mode

If the application is set to False, the option to enable this feature is grayed out and cannot be used. If the application supports the size and continuation of the app, it is necessary for the user to enable this function on the device, so it is necessary to confirm that this function works.

In mult i-window mode, you can execute up to three apps simultaneously on the split screen (see the left image) or run two apps in po p-up mode.

App Continuity without Multi-Window Mode

Like App Continuity, use the Android Manifest ResizeAbleactivity attribute to enable it. If the ResizeAbleactivity is not set, the default is true. Therefore, it is recommended that you set it yourself here to guarantee that the app works as intended.

If you want to support the continuity of the app but do not want to be used in mult i-window mode, this is possible.

First, set the ResizableActivity attribute to False to disable both App Continuity and Multi Window Mode. Next, use the following elements in the element:

Game Engine Features to Use

This will enable app continuation functions again without enabling mult i-window mode.

Unity

There are several useful features that are useful for using existing game engines for foldable devices. This section describes the outline of these functions. For more detailed information, we recommend that you refer to the engine documentation.

Unity is a very good engine for developing a foldable device, and you have little setup to enable foldable devices.

This engine automatically processes the size change of the application. The ResizeAbleactivity attribute is controlled by the Player setting option: Resizable Window (window size change). When enabled, the ResizeAbleaCtivity is set to true, and when disabled, the ResizeAbleactivity is set to False. This option is not available on old versions of Unity. If you do not have this option, you need to manually set ResizeAbleactivity.

Unreal Engine 4

The engine also provides a very robust UI scaling system that helps reduce the amount of work required to create a UI that runs on both the cover display and the main display. The canvas scaler and anchor system work very well with foldable devices, and can change the size and position of the elements consistently between the two displays, so the developers are two UI designs (main displays for cover displays). There is no need to create).

UNREAL ENGINE 4 is also an engine suitable for developing a foldable device, but it takes a little time to set up for foldable devices. First of all, Unreal Engine 4 disables the resizing event of the Android device by default, but can use the console variable to enable again with the device profile: 

R. EnablenatoresizeEvent = 1

The maximum aspect ratio of the default of Unreal Engine 4 is 2. 1. However, this is too small for the cover display of some folding devices, so black bars may be displayed on both sides of the image. Fortunately, this value can be easily changed with the project settings on the Unreal engine:

Platform -& gt; Android -& gt; maximum aspect ratio

In my test, 2. 8 was a good value. However, it is recommended that the user experiment to find the optimal value.

Samsung Remote Test Lab

Unreal engine UMG (Unreal Motion Graphics UI Designer) has a comprehensive tool set for creating a responsive UI design. This system is very useful for automatically scaling the UI element according to the screen size, and the anchor system is to ensure the UI element correctly between the two displays.

Android Jetpack WindowManager

Regardless of which engine you use, the best way to make sure that the app works well on a foldable device is to test on a foldable device. The Samsung Remote Testlab offers a foldable device that can be used to test the application if it is difficult for developers to obtain physical devices or expensive. You can use these devices for tests simply by creating Samsung accounts.

Despite being a very good engine for the development of foldable games, both Unity and Unreal are information about the current state of folding devices (that is, whether they are open, closed or half, or folded. It does not provide where it is located, what is the folding orientation, etc.). However, Android recently created a new library as part of Android Jetpack Libraries so that developers access this information and use them in the app.

Android Jetpack says, "According to the developer, the developers can concentrate on the code that is interested in reducing the number of constant code and working consistently between Android versions and devices. It is a group of libraries.

More Technical Resources

WindowManager is a new library of Android Jetpack suite, aiming for application developers to support new device forms and mult i-window environments. The library was released in January 2022 and targeted foldable devices, but in the documentation, future versions will be extended to more display types and window features.

This blog post includes a technical blog post and a Code Lab tutorial, which shows how to use Android Jetpack WindowManager on both Unity and Unreal. More.

To learn how to set up WindowManager in Java, we recommend starting from Jetpack WindowManager blog post

• Next, you will learn how to implement a simple flex mode setup in Unreal or Unity using WindowManager in code labs:
• https://developer. samsung. com/codelab/gamedev/flex-mode-unreal. html

https://developer. samsung. com/codelab/gamedev/flex-mode-unity. html

In the game developer community, you can participate in discussions on mobile games and folding devices.

Final Thoughts

Click here for other design precautions when designing an app for foldable devices and large screens.

Additional resources on the Samsung Developers site

Folding devices provide richer experiences than regular mobile phones. I hope this blog post and the accompanying tutorials have used these new form factors to provide the necessary information to start providing users a richer folding experience.