Sharing Thoughts on Big Data and Privacy

We wanted to draw your attention to several excellent pieces discussing and summarizing last Tuesday’s “Big Data and Privacy: Making Ends Meet” workshop:

• Jedidiah Bracy covered the event for the IAPP’s Privacy Perspectives blog. He highlights a number of the day’s discussions, and concludes that “the ethics of Big Data and technology will be discussed a lot in the months and years ahead.

• Howard Fienberg from the Marketing Research Association asks whether privacy and Big Data can coexist?  He provides a full summary of the day’s panels, and notes that “Big Data’s growing use, and fervor inside and out of the survey, opinion and marketing research profession, mean that privacy concerns regarding Big Data need to be addressed sooner rather than later.”

• Grant Gross writes for IDG News Service and discusses the event’s conversation on government use of Big Data. “The increasing uses of big data in all kinds of organizations, particularly surveillance agencies, should prompt a debate about legitimate data collection and practices, said several speakers at a Washington, D.C., big data and privacy forum,” he writes.

• Jonathan King, who with Professor Neil Richards prepared a paper in advance of the event, shares his thoughts on the day in a piece entitled “The New Washington Data Grid.”  He highlights the keynote address given by Rayid Ghani, and suggests that “the contrast between Ghani and the first two privacy panels highlighted the need for many more workshops between policy makers and technologists.”

The full report on the workshop is available here.