economy

Technology Policy Institute Tackles Big Data

A recent paper by the Technology Policy Institute takes a pro-business look at the Big Data phenomenon, finding “no evidence” that Big Data is creating any sort of privacy harms.  As I hope to lay out, I didn’t agree with several of the report’s findings, but I found the paper especially interesting as it critiques my essay from September’s “Big Data and Privacy” conference.  According to TPI, my “inflammatory” suggestion that ubiquitous data collection may harm the poor was presented “without evidence.” Let me first say that I’m deeply honored to have my writing critiqued; for better or worse, I am happy to have my thoughts somehow contribute to a policy conversation.  That said, while some free market voices applauded the report as a thoughtful first step at doing a a Big Data cost-benefit analysis, I found the report to be one-sided to its detriment.

As ever in the world of technology and law, definitions matter, and neither myself nor TPI can adequately define what “Big Data” even is.  Instead, TPI suggests that Big Data phenomenon describes the fact that data is “now available in real time, at larger scale, with less structure, and on different types of variables than previously.”  If I wanted to be inflammatory, I would suggest this means that personal data is being collected and iterated upon pervasively and continuously.  The paper then does a good job of exploring some of the unexpected benefits of this situation.  It points to the commonly-lauded Google Flu Trends as the posterchild for Big Data’s benefits, but neglects to mention the infamous example where Target was able to uncover a teenage customer was pregnant before her family.

At that point, the paper looks at several common privacy concerns surrounding Big Data and attempts to debunk them. Read More…

Europe Misdirects Rage on the US Safe Harbor

This morning, the European Commission released its report on the state of the US-EU Safe Harbor, a mechanism that provides for international data transfers, proposing a series of recommendations designed “to restore trust in data flows between the EU and the U.S.”  Europeans have long been critical of the Safe Harbor — and America’s free-wheeling attitude toward privacy in general — but the Summer of Snowden provided a perfect pretext to “reconsider” the efficacy of the Safe Harbor.

America’s hodgepodge or “sectoral” approach to privacy has increasingly placed U.S. officials on the defensive, and there’s no question the Safe Harbor can be improved.  However, conflating Safe Harbor reform with justified anger about expansive NSA snooping is counterproductive.  First and foremost, while public and private data sharing is increasingly intermingled, government access to data is not the same as commercial data use.  The Safe Harbor was explicitly designed to protect the commercial privacy interests of EU citizens.

It was not created to address national security issues, and the Safe Harbor specifically provides an exception from its requirements “to the extent necessary to meet national security, public interest, or law enforcement requirements.”  As FTC Commissioner Julie Brill has noted, national security exceptions to legal regimes are not unusual.  For example, the HIPAA Privacy Rule permits the disclosure of private health information in the interest of national security, and even the EU’s stringent Data Protection Directive includes an exception for state security or defense.

Read More…

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