Regulating big data: Rules for the new tools | The Economist
WHEN the internet was gathering steam in the mid 1990s, White House policy wonks got together under President Clinton’s nerdy aide, Ira Magaziner, to find ways to support it. Principles emerged like the “tax free internet” (ie, no punishing tariffs on ecommerce). Today, with big data in the headlines, a new gaggle of policy geeks have put forward a plan to harness technology while preserving privacy.
The 79-page report released by John Podesta, a counsellor to the president, on May 1st, makes six concrete recommendations. The most notable proposal is a federal law requiring companies to notify people if their personal information has been breached, to replace a raft of state laws. The report also calls for amending a 1986 law governing electronic communications so that protections for e-mails and content in the cloud are as strong as those that exist for their analogue equivalents. This would resolve several oddball rules, like the way e-mail older than 180 days is accessible to police without a warrant.
The report calls for rules covering the use of student data—specifically, data gathered in an educational context cannot be used for non-educational purposes, and the records should not exist in perpetuity, forever able to mar a person’s reputation. The report also looks closely at online advertising (which collect reams of data on individual web-surfing activities to target ads) and data-brokers (like those that create personal credit ratings) and largely supports their practices.
Importantly, instead of governing the collection of data, the report concentrates on the use of information. This reform has the support of many technology companies, such as Microsoft, since the whole point of big data is that it is possible to discover innovative uses for information that were never considered when it was collected, and so no one thought to ask for consent.
Indeed, a separate White House report, also released on May 1st by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (known as PCAST), bluntly noted: “Only in some fantasy world do users actually read these notices and understand their implications before clicking to indicate their consent.” This is a significant evolution in the government’s thinking, says Fred Cate, a privacy law expert at Indiana University, who participated in the public meetings that led to the Podesta report. “Only two years ago [the administration] published a ‘Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights’ with the right of consumers to control data about them as its first principle,” he notes. That is insufficient: placing the onus on individuals puts the legal burden on the least sophisticated party in the exchange.
The Podesta report also highlights how public services can be improved with data, especially “open data” in which state-generated or state-collected information—such as GPS or weather reports—is made freely available to use. At the same time, the report suggests significant restrictions on data mining for national security, some of which would actually put the White House at odds with its own Justice Department.
Strikingly, the report explores the abuses of big data, particularly by the government itself. “One of the most shameful instances of the government misusing its own data dates to the Second World War. Census data collected under strict guarantees of confidentiality was used to identify neighbourhoods where Japanese-Americans lived so they could be detained in internment camps,” it frankly notes. “Big data unquestionably increases the potential of government power to accrue un-checked.”
But the most novel examination is the way it looks beyond privacy to consider how technology can discriminate in subtle ways. For example, some online retailers use “predictive pricing” algorithms that charge different prices to customers based on a myriad factors, such as where they live, or even whether they use a Mac or a PC. Though there may be innocuous reasons for the price discrimination, there are few safeguards to ensure that the technology does not perpetuate unfair approaches.
It is important to “examine how algorithmically-driven decisions might exacerbate existing socio-economic disparities beyond the pricing of goods and services, including in education and workforce settings,” it states. “The increasing use of algorithms to make eligibility decisions must be carefully monitored for potential discriminatory outcomes for disadvantaged groups, even absent discriminatory intent.”
This discrimination manifests in different ways. For instance, an app called Street Bump, released by the city of Boston, uses a smartphone’s sensors to identify whenever a car is jolted, relaying that information to the city’s road-maintenance team. But the system has an inherent bias: richer and younger people are more inclined to have a smartphone and download the app, so bad roads in less tech-savvy places might not get fixed so readily because there’s less reporting. The bias was accidental but its effects are real. In this case, however, the designers realised the potential shortcoming at the outset and corrected for it by giving more weight to bumps from less posh areas.
The report was prepared at the request of President Barack Obama in January, when he announced reforms to intelligence community practices following the leaks by Edward Snowden. It calls on America to lead a global discussion on the subject.
Curiously, the report recommends extending to foreigners the protections in America’s Privacy Act of 1974, which requires federal agencies to disclose what information they collect on citizens and places restrictions on how it can be shared. The report is vague on how it would apply or even why it’s being proposed.
It may be a sop to the European Union, which loudly criticises American privacy rules as insufficient, as it updates its own rules that some say are overly stringent. But perhaps underlying it is a concern that other governments (say, Russia or China) may start collecting data about Americans, which the country would want to oppose.
John Podesta, formerly Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, is well suited to wrestle with these conundrums. As a young senate staffer in 1984, he wrote to the attorney general asking if wiretap rules applied to electronic communications like e-mail. When the answer came back that it wasn’t clear, he helped draft the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which still governs internet services today. Now 65, he’s trying to fix some of the shortcomings in his first try.
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Regulating big data: Rules for the new tools | The Economist
