White House Releases Report on “Big Data”

May 1, 2014

Reading Time : 1 min

By: Jo-Ellyn Sakowitz Klein, Francine E. Friedman, Matthew C. Thomas (Senior Public Policy Specialist)

The report focuses on how the public and private sectors can maximize the benefits of big data while minimizing its risks. The report loosely defines “big data” as “large, diverse, complex, longitudinal and/or distributed datasets generated from instruments, sensors, Internet transactions, email, video, click streams and/or all other digital sources available today and in the future.” After discussing issues surrounding collection and use of data in both the public and private sectors, the report discusses key questions for the development of a policy framework for big data:

1.  How government can harness big data for the public good while guarding against unacceptable uses against citizens;

2.  The extent to which big data alters the consumer landscape in ways that implicate core values;

3.  How to protect citizens from new forms of discrimination that may be enabled by big data technologies; and

4.  How big data affects the core tenet of modern privacy protection, the notice and consent framework that has been in wide use since the 1970s.

In its conclusion, the report makes several key policy recommendations, including advancing a consumer privacy bill of rights, passing national data breach and notification legislation, ensuring that student data is only used for educational purposes and amending the Electronic Communication Privacy Act so as to “ensure the standard of protection for online, digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical world.”

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