Posts about Big Data by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
By Daniel J. Solove The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit just issued a 97-page ruling limiting the NSA’s power to sweep up data about people’s phone calls. The case is ACLU v. Clapper, and the court held that the USA Patriot Act Section 215 doesn’t authorize the kind of sweeping collection of […]
. . . the Empire would have won. A search of records would have revealed where Luke Skywalker was living on Tatooine. A more efficient collection and aggregation of Jawa records would have located the droids immediately. Simple data analysis would have revealed that Ben Kenobi was really Obi Wan Kenobi. A search of birth […]
by Daniel J. Solove The Sony data breach is an exclamation mark on a year that is already known as the” Year of the Data Breach.” This data breach is the kind that makes even the least squeamish avert their eyes and wince. There are at least three things that this breach can teach […]
by Daniel J. Solove The FTC held a workshop this Monday about Big Data. The term “Big Data” is used everywhere these days, and depending upon who is talking about it, Big Data is either the hippest thing in the world and the producer of miracles that will save the human race, or it is […]
by Daniel J. Solove In three earlier posts, I’ve been exploring the nature of privacy and data security harms. In the first post, Privacy and Data Security Violations: What’s The Harm?, I explored how the law often fails to recognize harm for privacy violations and data breaches. In the second post, Why the Law Often […]
by Daniel J. Solove Last week, the White House released its report, Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values. My reaction to it is mixed. The report mentions some concerns about privacy with Big Data and suggests some reforms, but everything is stated so mildly, in a way designed to please everyone. The report is painted […]
Several years ago, the Department of Defense began developing a program called Total Information Awareness, a massive data mining project analyzing personal information on every citizen of the United States. After a series of blistering op-eds and strong negative public reaction, the Senate voted to stop all funding for the program.
There is still more interesting grist from the national telephone survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The report has an extensive discussion of price discrimination – offering different prices for the same product or service to different customers based on behavioral profiling. This practice is already happening. Supermarket discount cards are an example […]