CHAPTER 8: COMPARISONS – PRIVATE SECTOR ACTIVITY
no matter how hard one tries”.40 In 2008, Netflix released 100 million rental records
after removing personal identifiers, as part of an attempt to improve its film
recommendation system. Researchers were able to de-anonymise users by
comparing rankings and time stamps with public rankings and time stamps in the
Internet Movie Database.41
The general picture
8.93.
In the words of two commentators:
“The problem is that our ability to reveal patterns and new knowledge from
previously unexamined troves of data is moving faster than our current legal
and ethical guidelines can manage. We can now do things that were
impossible a few years ago, and we’ve driven off the existing ethical and legal
maps. If we fail to preserve the values we care about in our new digital society,
then our big data capabilities risk abandoning these values for the sake of
innovation and expediency.” 42
They argue elsewhere that “privacy protections focused on personally identifying
information are not enough when secondary uses of big data can reverse engineer
past, present and even future breaches of privacy, confidentiality and identity.”43
8.94.
The issue was addressed in John Podesta’s review of the implications of Big Data for
President Obama in 2014:44
“It will be especially important to re-examine the traditional notice and consent
framework that focuses on obtaining user permission prior to collecting data.
While notice and consent remains fundamental in many contexts, it is now
necessary to examine whether a greater focus on how data is used and reused
would be a more productive basis for managing privacy rights in a big data
environment. It may be that creating mechanisms for individuals to participate
in the use and distribution of his or her information after it is collected is actually
a better and more empowering way to allow people to access the benefits that
derive from their information. Privacy protections must also evolve in a way
that accommodates the social good that can come of big data use.”
8.95.
The ICO published a paper in 2014 exploring the implications of Big Data for personal
privacy.45 It advised organisations to carry out robust risk assessments regarding the
chance of re-identification, in light of the range of data sets available and the power
of Big Data analytics.
8.96.
Undoubtedly the knowledge about individuals that is available to companies and that
is traded amongst them is considerable and largely invisible to the individuals
40
V. Mayer-Schonberger and K. Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution that will transform how we live, work and
think, 2013.
B. Schneier, Data and Goliath, 2015, chapter 3.
J. King and N. Richards, “What’s Up with Big Data?”, Forbes, 28 March 2014.
N. Richards and J. King, “Big Data Ethics”, Wake Forest Law Review, 2014, p.393.
Executive Office of the President, Big data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values, (May 2014).
Big Data and data protection, (July 2014).
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43
44
45
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