With #ReclaimYourName, FTC Looks to Reel In Big Data Behaving …
PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi wasn’t the only high-powered woman to make waves at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival last week. One year post-Snowden and his NSA revelations, FTC Commissioner Julie Brill said in a chat that the “state of privacy is improving.”
Brill said that awareness of consumers, the public and media has grown on both the government and commercial sides. Now that awareness will help consumers push back against a growing number of data brokers that collect vast amounts of data on hundreds of millions of consumers to resell or use in targeted marketing.
“Some data brokers have 3,000 data points on each consumer in the United States—they have it for just about every US consumer,” Brill said, noting a recent study. “Three billion transactions per month put into profiles about consumers.”
According the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the privacy regulations that exist today don’t often protect consumers from big data analytics. “Many notions of privacy rely on informed consent for the disclosure and use of an individual’s private data. However, big data means that data is a resource that can be used and reused, often in ways that were inconceivable at the time the data was collected.”
“We have great laws about privacy but developed in the 1990’s when information flowed in silos, banks, credit agencies, HIPA—health information held by doctors, and insurance companies,” Brill said. “Now, because of the ease of computing, data doesn’t recognize these silos anymore, data is flowing more freely.”
To help promote transparency in the data broker industry, Brill announced a new initiative, Reclaim Your Name, that will give consumers greater control over their individual data, of which there is an inconceivable amount.
According to the Senate Commerce Committee’s recently released report, “A Review of the Data Broker Industry: Collection, Use, and Sale of Consumer Data for Marketing Purposes,” 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the past two years, and in 2020, the amount of digital data produced will exceed 40 zettabytes, which is the equivalent of 5,200 gigabytes for every man, woman and child on planet earth.
Check out more highlights of Brill’s Aspen Ideas panel on Big Data and Privacy below.
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With #ReclaimYourName, FTC Looks to Reel In Big Data Behaving …
