The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing | Electronic Fronti... - 0 views
www.eff.org/...ta-report-good-bad-and-missing
2014 EFF mass data indienationnews law technology legal White House report review privacy yourrights notice and consent
shared by John Lemke on 05 May 14
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the report recognized that email privacy is critical
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one issue was left conspicuously unaddressed in the report. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the civil agency in charge of protecting investors and ensuring orderly markets, has been advocating for a special exception to the warrant requirement. No agency can or should have a get-out-of-jail-free card for bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
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the algorithm is only as fair as the data fed into it.
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the danger of discrimination remains due to the very digital nature of big data
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especially the elderly, minorities, and the poor
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an example of this in Boston, which had a pilot program to allow residents to report potholes through a mobile app but soon recognized that the program was inherently flawed because “wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.”
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The authors of the report agree, recommending that the Privacy Act be extended to all people, not just US persons.
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metadata (the details associated with your communications, content, or actions, like who you called, or what a file you uploaded file is named, or where you were when you visited a particular website) can expose just as much information about you as the “regular” data it is associated with, so it deserves the same sort of privacy protections as “regular” data.
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The report merely recommended that the government look into the issue.
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Did the report give a strong enough recommendation? "looking into" and doing are much different
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several other government reports have taken a much stronger stance and explicitly stated that metadata deserves the same level of privacy protections as “regular” data.
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We think the report should have followed the lead of the PCAST report and acknowledged that the distinction between data and metadata is an artificial one, and recommended the appropriate reforms.
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the 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.”
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Consumers have a right to know when their data is exposed, whether through corporate misconduct, malicious hackers, or under other circumstances. Recognizing this important consumer safeguard, the report recommends that Congress “should pass legislation that provides a single national data breach standard along the lines of the Administration's May 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.”
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While at first blush this may seem like a powerful consumer protection, we don’t think that proposal is as strong as existing California law. The proposed federal data breach notification scheme would preempt state notification laws, removing the strong California standard and replacing it with a weaker standard.
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In other words, it failed at what can be done and it would actually lower standards when compared to what California has in place currently.
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We were particularly disconcerted
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the Fort Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan
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two big concerns
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First, whistleblowers are simply not comparable to an Army officer who massacres his fellow soldiers
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Secondly, the real big-data issue at play here is overclassification of enormous quantities of data.
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Over 1.4 million people hold top-secret security clearances. In 2012, the government classified 95 million documents. And by some estimates, the government controls more classified information than there is in the entire Library of Congress.
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Don't leave this stat out. More classified documents than LOC documents. WTF? A "democracy" with more secret documents than public?
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The report argues that in today’s connected world it’s impossible for consumers to keep up with all the data streams they generate (intentionally or not), so the existing “notice and consent” framework (in which companies must notify and get a user’s consent before collecting data) is obsolete. Instead, they suggest that more attention should be paid to how data is used, rather than how it is collected.
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This is the most troubling part perhaps, isn't the collection without consent where the breech of privacy begins?
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An unfortunate premise of this argument is that automatic collection of data is a given
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While we agree that putting more emphasis on responsible use of big data is important, doing so should not completely replace the notice and consent framework.
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Despite being a fairly thorough analysis of the privacy implications of big data, there is one topic that it glaringly omits: the NSA’s use of big data to spy on innocent Americans.
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If we ignore it, it will go away? Did they not just mostly ignore it and accept it as a given for corporations and completely ignore it regarding the government? Pretty gangster move isn't it?
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Even though the review that led to this report was announced during President Obama’s speech on NSA reform, and even though respondents to the White House’s Big Data Survey “were most wary of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies are collecting and using data about them,” the report itself is surprisingly silent on the issue.2 This is especially confusing given how much the report talks about the need for more transparency in the private sector when it comes to big data. Given that this same logic could well be applied to intelligence big data programs, we don’t understand why the report did not address this vital issue.