Data Protection & #Privacy - 8 issues from an October 2014 International Conference

I have summarised these thoughts from this UN Global Pulse blog post, this Bloomberg post, this JDSupra Business Advisor post and this Hunton & Williams LLP post 

1) Governments leverage of big data (one definition of which is - large volumes of data from a variety of data sources collected and processed at velocity) - to enhance their practices - often faces concerns on issues like valid informed consent that the private sector seems to have fewer problems with.

2) Big data analytics constraining people's free choice - for example the growing sophistication of big data analytics allows increasingly finely defined categories of consumers - choices presented to people based on their categorization could "deprive people of free choice” and be a “frightening manifestation of digital predestination".

3) Proactive implementation of privacy by design and the use of privacy impact assessments - especially by governments who want to use big data for social good to prevent new modes of discrimination that some uses of big data may enable.

4) A preference to store data locally on a device in the internet of things - and when this is not feasible the need for businesses to employ end-to-end encryption.

5) Re-identification of pseudononimised data - particularly where such data is derived from devices connected to the Internet.

6) Lack of clarity and consensus of trans-border data regulations - which leads to increased legal and ethical uncertainty in big data practices - and so a need for clear and consistent policies with a focus on harmonizing procedural enforcement and cooperation between states and other stakeholders to ensure the coexistence of different norms across jurisdictions.

7) Lack of privacy enhancing technologies for proper data anonymisation and aggregation - and so big data could “challenge key privacy principles, in particular the principles of purpose limitation and data minimization.”

8) Net neutrality  - the principle that all Internet traffic is treated equally and without discrimination, restriction or interference.