Privacy in a Time of Big Data
Ann Racuya-Robbins
The emergence and existence of Big Data technologies and techniques have scoped the challenge of insuring privacy in contemporary life. It is fair to say that there is an inverse relationship, roughly speaking, between big data and privacy. That is as data scales up privacy challenges become more grave. The factors pressuring big data to scale, to get bigger, faster… are powerful including a hoped for competitive edge and speed and cost reduction of analytics to acquire these competitive edges under the name patterns. While the term patterns has gained currency in the field the term’s meaning is not so well understood. It is important to state clearly that the patterns that are sought are themselves data that contain or create an advantage. Understanding is itself an advantage. By advantage is meant largely a competitive commercial monetary advantage by a third party other than the data subject.
Privacy is a subject of individual life and living.
Privacy is an expression of biologic specificity. Privacy properly ensured and governed preserves innovation, creativity and living development. In this way privacy is a key ingredient of survival and successful maturation. The pervasion of data that has thrown open the loss of privacy carried in computer and ICT infrastructures is a relatively new phenomenon. The concern for privacy is a recognition of the broadening value of all individual life. A recognition of the dignity and richness of every life. A recognition that individual life is not rightly an object or property of another.
Privacy cannot be reduced to personal information i.e. name, address and/or other factuals. PII is an obsolete moniker for our subject.
Let us stipulate that we will in this first instance be referring to living individual adults. Living has many stages and forms that must to be addressed later.
Privacy is—living individual’s control over and freedom and refuge from data collection, capture, extraction, surveillance, analytics, predictions, excessive persuasive practices and communication of the living individual’s life, including external or internal bodily functions, creations, conditions, behavior, social, political, familial and intimate interaction including mental, neural and microbial functioning—unless sanctioned by civil and criminal law and when sanctioned only under protocols where the ways and means of collection, capture, extraction, surveillance, analytics and communication including new methods to emerge are governed by appropriate social cooperation principles and safeguards embedded in ICT infrastructures and architectures overseen by democratic courts and civil and community organizations and individuals peers charged with insuring proper conduct.
Living individuals own the data generated by or from their lives. Should revenues be generated from the collection, capture, extraction, surveillance, analytics and communication of the living individual’s data the majority of revenue generated from the living individual’s life belong to the living individual. Data ownership, provenance, curation, governance as well as the consequences of violations of privacy practices must be encapsulated in or within the data, be auditable and travel in encrypted form with the data. Where possible block chain techniques shall be employed as well as counterfactual strategies (processes) in engineering privacy.
Provenance is an accounting of the history of data in an ICT setting.
Next Steps
Define further Data Governance, Data Provenance, Data Curation, Data Valuation. Integrate the principles and practices outlined above into an archetypal Privacy Use Case(s) and articulate the Privacy Use Case as it proceeds through the reference architecture.