Where Privacy Meets Big Data?

The White House has released the findings of the Big Data and Privacy Working Group Review, a 90-day study commissioned in January from the Obama Administration to examine how big data will transform the way we live and work and alter the relationships between government, citizens, businesses, and consumers.

Big data analysis has tremendous potential for those wanting to understand large trends in public sentiment and behavior. At NDI, we make use of Crimson Hexagon, a tool which analyzes vast amounts of social media data to understand sentiment and prevalence of particular topics. Through our work with the Open Government Partnership, we also encourage governments to make data more open and available for public use.

Yet, as the report notes, “Big data technologies, together with the sensors that ride on the “Internet of Things,” pierce many spaces that were previously private.” This desire to protect privacy rights address a range of concerns reflecting different types of intrusion into a person’s sense of self, each requiring different protections.

Indeed, technologies such as facial recognition technologies, signals from home wireless networks, increased use of networked devices, and more makes collection of vast swaths of information much easier, while the opportunity to limit such collection difficult, but not impossible. Further, the report notes that “once data is collected, it can be very difficult to keep anonymous. While there are promising research efforts underway to obscure personally identifiable information within large data sets, far more advanced efforts are presently in use to re-identify seemingly ‘anonymous’ data.”

This report serves as an important first step for engagement between government and civil liberty organizations about how to maintain citizen’s privacy rights in a big data era that we are in, and welcomes the public dialogue about how to further protect privacy rights in data transparency. In fact, we welcome many of the recommendations from this report.

Advancing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which would provide consumers clear, understandable, reasonable standards for how their personal information is used in the big data era is a useful first step for citizens worldwide to gain back control over their data used by corporations. Disclosure requirements for data breaches at businesses or other organizations at a national level would also be a major step forward to protect individual data. Further, updating laws to reflect the digital realities of how commonly used ICTs function, rather than relying on communication laws that are created prior to the use of email, cloud computing, and other tools, is a major improvement for ensuring the law of the land best protect digital content through a modern and more accurate understanding of communications technologies.

Despite this important first step, we recognize that there is still much more work to be done to ensure and protect individual privacy rights through the use of big data, and look forward for further engagement with governments, technology experts, and citizens to identify actionable solutions.