A reminder of why data privacy matters

Published in

DataScan

3 min readOct 7, 2018

Europe is drawing fresh battle lines around the ethics of big data. The anonymisation myth. Would you hand over personal data to pay for a coffee?

A reminder of why data privacy matters. Check this chilling insight into China’s dystopian digital dictatorship which is being built to “exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens” by using a “social credit” system to grant privileges, and punishments. Matthew Carney explains how the system is affecting daily lives, including an investigative journalist who is now locked out of society and a high scoring couple who’s child is able to attend the best schools and have the best healthcare available.

Europe is drawing fresh battle lines around the ethics of big data. Natasha Lomas deep dives into how Europe is leading the way for better standards around the use of data. Lomas interviews Giovanni Buttarelli, EU data protection supervisor, who states that this year’s GDPR fines will only be the start, and he is due to “publish a manifesto for a next-generation framework that envisages active collaboration between Europe’s privacy overseers and antitrust regulators” next year.

Ad trade bodies unveil data transparency label inspired by food traffic light labelling. Unveiled at Advertising Week New York, the data transparency label “will help marketers clean up their data footprint” by outlining “vital information such as source, collection, segmentation criteria, recency and cleansing specifics”. By clearly defining critical data source information, it is aimed to help brands from contravening the GDPR by improving data quality, integrity and decision-making.

Sharing data effortlessly whilst keeping control. Douwe Lycklama from Innopay discusses how it would be possible for the Dutch government to achieve their goal to give citizens more control over their data. As a solution, Lycklama suggests leaving data where it is, and instead sharing access permissions with agreements around the “identification, authentication and authorisation of the people and organisations”. Then, “if we want to stop sharing our data, we simply withdraw those rights”.

The anonymisation myth. Dr. Barry Devlin, a founder of the data warehousing industry, weighs in on the dangers of re-identification for individuals, which is easily possible by “combining anonymised data with freely available demographic data”. The “privacy problem is old” yet rapidly growing as more data is collected, shared and analysed. Devlin states the importance of balancing risks, adopting stronger privacy technologies and ensure ethics training is widely implemented.