In the mix
1) The CDC recently used shopper-card data to track a salmonella outbreak that sickened 245 in 44 states. It turned out the pepper in salami made in Rhode Island was the culprit. Although the CDC began to suspect through interviews and questionnaires that some sort of Italian meat product was the problem, the people they talked to couldn't remember precisely what they had bought and the shopper-card records helped them identify the actual product.Great story, right? Unless you're the director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, in which case, the story smacks of privacy invasion by the government. The CDC got the records with the permission of the account holders, but to Katherine Albrecht and several of the commenters to the Yahoo News Story, that didn't assuage their fears.Here's a choice quote: "I'd rather have a few die from poisoning and then they fix the problem then have the entire country enslaved, thank you very much."There was at least one person who pointed out commenting on a Yahoo news story wasn't going to do much to preserve their privacy either.2) MySpace is selling bulk user data! I'm with ReadWriteWeb:
I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I'm hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real-estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we'll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.
We don't want another AOL debacle on our hands, but we also don't want to give up on the possibilities of "big data" because we prematurely assume better privacy-creating techniques and standards aren't available.3) My, it's a privacy-obsessed week! Here's one person's argument "why no one cares about privacy." It's a good round-up of pithy quotes from people like Judge Posner, new "talk about me" sites like Blippy.com, and surveys demonstrating the change in the public's attitude over time. Compare this to a Harris poll conducted in 1998, the same year Google was founded, that found a remarkable 80 percent of people were hesitant to shop online because of privacy worries. Still, articles like this and the comments to the Yahoo CDC-shopper data article show how much our discussion of privacy involves people yelling at each other across a very big divide. Is the choice really a binary one? Privacy + a few deaths versus Big Brother + public health data? I don't care if the CDC has access to my grocery records; at the same time, I don't plan to sign up for Blippy.com and broadcast my purchase of kale and four kinds of cheese this morning. (Oops, I just did.) Maybe we should stop talking about "privacy" and start talking about specific situations.