Privacy protection or data value: Can we have both?

Abstract

Efforts to derive maximum value from data have led to an expectation that this is “just the cost of living in the modern world.” Ultimately this form of data exploitation will not be sustainable either due to customer dissatisfaction or government intervention to ensure private information is treated with the same level of protection that we currently find in paper-based systems. Legal, technical, and moral boundaries need to be placed on how personal information is used and how it can be combined to create inferences that are often highly accurate but not guaranteed to be correct. Agrawal’s initial call-to-arms in 2002 has generated a large volume of work but the analytics and privacy communities are not truly communicating with the goal of providing high utility from the data collected but in such a way that it does not violate the intended purpose for which it was initially collected [2]. This paper describes the current state of the art and makes a call to open a true dialog between these two communities. Ultimately, this may be the only way current analytics will be allowed to continue without severe government intervention and/or without severe actions on behalf of the people from whom the data is being collected and analyzed by either refusing to work with exploitative corporations or litigation to address the harms arising from the current practices.