W.H. 'big data' review spotlights privacy debate – Josh Gerstein and …
A three-month White House review of how business and government mine massive data sets sees big public and economic benefits from the practice — along with new dangers — but sketches out a murky path towards enforcing privacy protections in the booming tech sector.
The White House closed its so-called “big data” review Thursday, including in its findings a set of recommendations for policies to protect individuals. Those suggestions include include passing national legislation on responding to data breaches, and a fresh call for baseline consumer privacy legislation the White House first recommended in 2012.
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President Barack Obama launched the review, led by White House counselor John Podesta, during a January speech calling for reforms to National Security Agency surveillance. The review stokes an already simmering debate about the ways businesses collect, sell, and utilize data on millions of Americans.
“The big data revolution presents incredible opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy and every corner of society,” Podesta said in a blog post announcing the report. “But big data raises serious questions, too, about how we protect our privacy and other values in a world where data collection is increasingly ubiquitous and where analysis is conducted at speeds approaching real time.”
The report underscores the value of “big data” — a key component that the technology industry was hoping to see, given its reliance on user data. Large data sets are leading the way toward advancements in health care, energy, and agriculture, the 79-page report says.
But it also cautions that improper use of data can result in discrimination against “vulnerable classes.”
“An important conclusion of this study is that big data technologies can cause societal harms beyond damages to privacy, such as discrimination against individuals and groups,” the report states.
“…Just as neighborhoods can serve as a proxy for racial or ethnic identity, there are new worries that big data technologies could be used to ‘digitally redefine’ unwanted groups, either as customers, employees, tenants or recipients of credit. A significant finding of this report is that big data could enable new forms of discrimination and predatory practices.”
The critical question is whether or how the White House will act on its findings. Pushing new regulations or legislation for commercial data use is far from easy, given the tech industry’s lobbying might and the Republican-controlled House’s general inclination against business regulation. The administration, for example, has worked for two years on consumer privacy legislation, but has yet to introduce any on Capitol Hill.
Of the six “actionable” proposals in the report, several had been previously endorsed or pursued by the administration in some form or at some level. A plan to dig into possible discrimination based on data sets is similar in focus to a still-unfinished Federal Trade Commission of “data brokers.” The report’s call for changes to federal law governing searches of e-mail records is largely the same as previous administration statements, and contains the same caveats about needing to address the concerns of government agencies which lack the power to obtain criminal search warrants.
The only recommendation that seemed dramatically new was a call to ensure that data collection on students in school is used only for educational purposes.
Just in the past couple of weeks, one major education-focused data gathering effort called inBloom shut down, and Google announced that it would stop scanning student e-mails to deliver targeted advertising through its Google Apps for Education platform.
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W.H. 'big data' review spotlights privacy debate – Josh Gerstein and …
