Why The New Era of Big Data Requires Innovative Privacy Initiatives

“Data can either be useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.” — Paul Ohm

Privacy and data collection go together like peanut butter and jelly, but in the world of big data, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to work with anonymous data without crossing a privacy line. So what’s a business supposed to do? Steve Touw offers some insights into how organizations can honor privacy without rendering data useless in his talk Privacy and Machine Learning: Peanut Butter and Jelly.

Not So Anonymous

Gawker ran an article recently outlining how much celebrities tipped their taxis using supposedly anonymous data. The problem is that linking data together often causes broken privacy. In the case of the taxis, the media was able to link picture information to anonymized government data to build a picture that broke those celebrities’ privacy.

So what do you do? The case for more privacy initiatives.

If you hide all the data from taxis (name, date, medallion, pickup time, etc.) the data becomes useless. You don’t know how…