How can privacy-by-design improve services and data protection?
The truth about cryptocurrencies. Will data-sharing drive the next generation of the NHS? Everything you wanted to know about blockchains.
All included in this week’s curated data digest below. 👇🏼
How can privacy-by-design improve services and data protection?
Paul Henman, associate professor of digital sociology and social policy at The University of Queensland, explains how adopting “privacy by design” principles can improve national security. 📈 Henman argues that rather than governments amassing as much data as possible in a “mega-database”, different, smaller databases should be distributed and matched:
There are design alternatives to creating a large central database that reduce the scope of data-sharing, infringements on privacy, and attractiveness to hackers. By installing matching algorithms in each of the eight state and territory’s existing driver’s license databases, the government could achieve the functionality it requires.
In other words, instead of searching one large database, it would search multiple databases at once: the driver’s license databases of each state and territory, the passport database and the immigration database.
A truly distributed would mean that if a state or territory’s database was hacked, the scope of the data leak would be smaller. While the federal government might argue that its centralised approach is faster and more efficient, this is unlikely to be true. Searching smaller databases simultaneously can be faster than one larger database.
Great write-up by Jamila Omaar on how much it actually costs to store data indefinitely on the blockchain.💰 💰 💰 → 10 hot data security and privacy technologies. 🔥
The truth about cryptocurrencies.
BRILLIANT post by Adam Ludwin explaining cyrptocurrencies (or crypto assets) and their true driving forces. I highly recommend reading the full article. 🙌
Simply put, crypto assets enable decentralised applications, which “enable services we already have today, like payments, storage, or computing, but without a central operator of those services”. 🚀
Ludwin argues that this type of software is useful for “people who need censorship resistance”, such as people who are “off the grid” 🕵, but everyone else is pretty much better off using normal applications for now — as “they are 10x better on every other dimension”:
Will data-sharing drive the next generation of the NHS?
The findings were published from an independent report, commissioned in February, stating how Britain can become a world leader in AI. 🏆 Crucially, one of the key recommendations states that “data from patients’ health records should be shared with private firms to improve care using AI”:
Industry experts call for the secure sharing of anonymised data about people’s health and lifestyles — arguing they, as well as well as private technology companies, will benefit.
Questionably — the report argues a new AI council should be created but it wouldn’t be in charge of regulating systems. This report comes following it being revealing a further 162,000 NHS files are missing, “in addition to the 702,000 pieces of paperwork already known to have gone astray”. 🙀
A digestible write-up on how the UK’s Data Protection Bill and the GDPR will work together. Both are pushing in the same direction — towards “strengthening personal control of data” — as a reflection of today’s data-driven business world and “the public’s increasing understanding of the importance of data protection and privacy”. 💯
Find more information on how the two overlap on the ICO’s website here. — Also, the ICO announced a new hotline for organisations that employ fewer than 250 people to access free advice on preparing for the new data protection regulations. 📞
Miscellaneous
AlphaGo Zero: Single neural net — learning from scratch. 🤖
It takes just $1000 to track someone’s location with mobile ads. 🔍
Life beyond Hadoop. 👀
Visualising data — Python graph gallery. 🐍
Colourising B&W photos with neural networks. 💥
Alphabet plans to build a “future city” in Canada. 🌇
Qualcomm achieved the first 5G data connection. 📱
Everything you wanted to know about blockchains (incl. image above). ✅
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