‘Big Data’ Raises Big Privacy Concerns, FTC Adviser, Senate Commerce Staffer Say
Advances in “big data” come at the expense of individual privacy, FTC Senior Policy Adviser Paul Ohm told the State of the Net conference Tuesday. While acknowledging the benefits of big data, it’s too early to have informed conversations and “the benefits tend to get overblown,” he said, citing Google’s flu-trends service. Google may be able to use search-term analysis to deduct which areas are suffering from the flu, but Google is not sharing that information with the Centers for Disease Control to make the information actionable, he continued.
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Using only aggregate data does not always quell privacy concerns, Ohm said. If data are out there, people will find ways to link that anonymized data back to real people, he said, citing a Netflix database that allowed users to identify supposedly anonymous Netflix subscribers based on how they rated a small number of movies. “There will be bad actors, they will get access to this data,” he said, especially when “the power of big data is the ability to make inferences on reasonably fine-grained groups of people.” “The vast majority” of big data analytics does not affect personal privacy, but “when there is an expense to privacy, I think we should have discussions about whether the benefits outweigh the costs,” he said.
To combat any adverse effects, data collectors should be transparent, Ohm said. “Transparency is key, but remember, it’s a dynamic transparency,” he said: Because big-data collection practices and uses are constantly changing, it’s essential to have “an ongoing vigilant conversation” between the data industry, consumers and government
The Senate Commerce Committee under Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., is investigating how big data are used to collect information and then market to consumers, said Erik Jones, the committee’s deputy general counsel. Last year Rockefeller opened inquiries into the data collection practices of companies he identified as data brokers. As consumers do more and more online, “there’s a digital footprint that’s available” which is collected and then used to target consumers, Jones said. “We very rarely open inquiries like this,” he said of the committee, which indicates how significant is the issue of big data.
"We're not suggesting that there’s something inherently wrong” with big data, Jones said: Instead, the committee wants to learn more about what information is being collected, how specific that information is and how that information is used. Consumers and government officials don’t understand what is being collected, he said: “At this point, it’s essentially a black box.&rdquo
"We ought to be focusing on use” rather than just data collection, said Becky Burr, chief privacy officer at Neustar. Big data is a “powerful tool for economic growth and … delivering real consumer benefits,” Burr said. Big data is “actionable data” and can be used “for smart decision making,” she said, something she said she hopes to convey to Rockefeller and FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz.