A White House committee that convened to investigate the risks of big data has released a report urging the U.S. government to take a more proactive stance on consumer data protection. The report warns that big data can (and likely already is) being used to violate consumers’ privacy, and to discriminate against them based on race, gender, or income. For example, U.S. housing legislation prohibits selectively advertising based on consumers’ credit reports, but big data gives advertisers the tools to effectively do that anyway by inferring credit history from a slew other data points.
Big data collection also makes consumer data vulnerable to corporate hacks, an issue that came to the forefront again yesterday when Target CEO Greg Steinhaffel stepped down because of a major data breach on his watch.
The report recommends more stringent regulation about how data can be collected, stored and used. And while any direct outcomes of the report will only directly affect American citizens, it touches on topics such as discrimination, corporate accountability and consumer rights that are of interest to all connected citizens.
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John Montgomery, GroupM Interaction COO, quoted in Adweek
There were three things that stood out. First, the report makes the point that whatever the perceived harm of big data, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages and that government should be careful about how it legislates. They don’t want to crush the golden goose. The government recognized it’s important to not focus on data collection, but focus on use. That’s huge insight.
Second, the report recognized that the moment a consumer clicks on something, the data exists and you can’t do anything about it. That’s an epiphany that none of the government organizations have put down on paper. It puts the whole Do Not Track debate in perspective.
Third, the report demands education as a solution. It’s important for [the advertising community] to educate the consumer. The consumer also needs to take some responsibility about their role in this new technological world and understand the risks.
David Sanger and Steve Lohr @ The New York Times
[T]he most significant findings in the report focus on the recognition that data can be used in subtle ways to create forms of discrimination — and to make judgments, sometimes in error, about who is likely to show up at work, pay their mortgage on time or require expensive treatment. The report states that the same technology that is often so useful in predicting places that would be struck by floods or diagnosing hard-to-find illnesses in infants also has “the potential to eclipse longstanding civil rights protections in how personal information is used in housing, credit, employment, health, education and the marketplace.”
Steve Smith @ MediaPost
Most of the serious minds exploring the implications of behavioral tracking and consumer rights over the years have always known that the real third rail of data-driven marketing and targeting is not privacy. Instead, discrimination is the area where this industry is most in danger of moving outside the lines of acceptable behavior, where legislators and citizens will quickly align with even with the most rabid anti-commercial watchdog. When audiences can be segmented and targeted in ways that provide preferential or punitive pricing to some, or exclude some targets from opportunities: that is when data catapults across any academic argument about whether cookies violate privacy.
Jeremy Gillula, Kurt Opsahl and Rainey Reitman @ the Electronic Frontiers Foundation
[T]he White House suggested advancing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which includes the idea that “consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it,” as well as “a right to access and correct personal data.” It barely mentioned, however, one of the key reasons a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights is so important: namely the tremendous disparity in knowledge between consumers and the companies who collect and analyze data about them. … [C]onsumers “frequently believe wrongly that the law or a company’s privacy policies block certain uses of that data or its dissemination.” This informational asymmetry puts consumers at a huge disadvantage, and the only way to correct it is through transparency.
Nathaniel Mott @ Pando Daily
It’s unclear if any of these recommendations will lead to actual change. These reports, like the one released by the Obama administration last year, make for good public relations but are often just stacks of paper that will be ignored shortly after their release. And, as the New York Times notes, focusing on these issues to distract from the National Security Agency’s controversial programs is just diversionary pandering meant to distract from other problems.
