Consumer Watchdog also joined 21 other public interest groups in a statement to the White House Big Data study group headed by John Podesta, Senior Counselor to the President and Nicole Wong, Deputy Chief Technology Officer, spelling out six key requirements for good Big Data policy.
"In the murky world of data brokers there is virtually no transparency," wrote John M. Simpson,
Consumer Watchdog's Privacy Project director. "People don't know what
digital dossiers have been assembled about them, what the data is used
for or what decisions are being made about them without their
knowledge."
Read Consumer Watchdog's comments here: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/whitehousebigdata033114.pdf
"We
call on the Administration to introduce baseline privacy legislation
and to implement the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," wrote Simpson.
"You must protect a person's right to control whether data about him or
her is collected and how it is used."
The
comments from the 22-member coalition said that while Big Data can
support commercial growth, government programs, and opportunities for
innovation, it "creates new problems including pervasive surveillance;
the collection, use, and retention of vast amounts of personal data;
profiling and discrimination; and the very real risk that over time more
decision-making about individuals will be automated, opaque, and
unaccountable."
Here
are the six requirements the 22 groups said must be included in the
White House's final report on Big Data and the Future of Privacy:
TRANSPARENCY:
Entities that collect personal information should be transparent about
what information they collect, how they collect it, who will have access
to it, and how it is intended to be used. Furthermore, the algorithms
employed in Big Data should be made available to the public.
OVERSIGHT:
Independent mechanisms should be put in place to assure the integrity
of the data and the algorithms that analyze the data. These mechanisms
should help ensure the accuracy and the fairness of the decision-making.
ACCOUNTABILITY:
Entities that improperly use data or algorithms for profiling or
discrimination should be held accountable. Individuals should have clear
recourse to remedies to address unfair decisions about them using their
data. They should be able to easily access and correct inaccurate
information collected about them.
ROBUST
PRIVACY TECHNIQUES: Techniques that help obtain the advantages of big
data while minimizing privacy risks should be encouraged. But these
techniques must be robust, scalable, provable, and practical. And
solutions that may be many years into the future provide no practical
benefit today.
MEANINGFUL
EVALUATION: Entities that use big data should evaluate its usefulness
on an ongoing basis and refrain from collecting and retaining data that
is not necessary for its intended purpose. We have learned that the
massive metadata program created by the NSA has played virtually no role
in any significant terrorism investigation. We suspect this is true
also for many other "Big Data" programs.
CONTROL:
Individuals should be able to exercise control over the data they
create or is associated with them, and decide whether the data should be
collected and how it should be used if collected.
Read the public interest groups' joint comments here: http://privacycoalition.org/Big.Data.Coalition.Ltr.pdf
The
22 groups who signed the joint statement are: Advocacy for Principled
Action in Government, American Association of Law Libraries, American
Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Bill of Rights
Defense Committee, Center for Digital Democracy, Center for Effective
Government, Center for Media Justice, Consumer Action, Consumer
Federation of America, Consumer Task Force for Automotive Issues,
Consumer Watchdog, Council for Responsible Genetics, Electronic Privacy
Information Center (EPIC), Foolproof Initiative, OpenTheGovernment.org,
National Center for Transgender Equality, Patient Privacy Rights PEN
American Center, Privacy Journal, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy
Times, and Public Citizen, Inc.
Visit Consumer Watchdog's website at www.consumerwatchdog.org
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