John Villasenor, Professor of Public Policy at UCLA, recently projected that it will be possible for governments to record and analyze everything an individual says and does in the near future. In the wake of the NSA revelations you could argue this already exists, so...
Privacy / Security
Recent Articles
Big Data and its threat to The Fourth Amendment
John Villasenor, Professor of Public Policy at UCLA, recently projected that it will be possible for governments to record and analyze everything an individual says and does in the near future. In the wake of the NSA revelations you could argue this already exists, so...
Big Data and its threat to The Fourth Amendment
John Villasenor, Professor of Public Policy at UCLA, recently projected that it will be possible for governments to record and analyze everything an individual says and does in the near future. In the wake of the NSA revelations you could argue this already exists, so...
We’re all being mined for data – but who are the real winners?
It's exactly a year since Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA and GCHQ surveillance began to reach the public domain. As a result, we now know quite a lot about the ways the NSA and its overseas franchises have mastered "big data" technology to hoover up our...
My Experiment Opting Out of Big Data Made Me Look Like a Criminal
This week, the President is expected to release a report on big data, the result of a 90-day study that brought together experts and the public to weigh in on the opportunities and pitfalls of the collection and use of personal information in government, academia, and...
Meet The Woman Who Did Everything In Her Power To Hide Her Pregnancy From Big Data
Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, had an idea: would it be possible to hide her pregnancy from big data? Thinking about technology—the way we use it and the way it uses us—is her professional life’s work. Pregnant women, she...
Parents win against cloud storage of US students’ private information
People are a little touchy about data collection nowadays. They were most certainly touchy about inBloom, a non-profit that was offering to house and manage student data for public school districts across the US by extracting a dizzying array of information - we're...
Evolution as a Cybersecurity Strategy
Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” People describe the Internet as a hostile network — which is true — and that got me thinking about other hostile environments where a successful strategy...
Surveillance fears are causing people to be more cautious online — and that’s good
Almost half of Americans are increasingly cautious about their use of the internet following the NSA surveillance leaks, according to a Harris poll commissioned by security outfit ESET. This is pretty much what I and many others predicted when the agency’s data...
Would you borrow money from your boss? The privacy impact of ‘Big Data’ loans
Would you take out a loan from the company you work for? Plenty of new lenders are betting that you might. But even if you wouldn’t, a new crop of lending products is bound to impact your privacy. The National Consumer Law Center released a report recently called “Big...
10 Ways To Fight Digital Theft & Fraud
The best way to thwart digital theft and fraud is to use a holistic, connected approach that takes advantage of the latest technologies and applies advanced analytics to vast data sets. It's an approach IBM touted at a mid-March event in New York where it brought...
Big data is watching you
Three years ago the satirical news service The Onion announced that the CIA was shutting down many of its surveillance operations due to the runaway success of the state-controlled social media service, Facebook. After years of running costly spying operations, the...
Big Data And Privacy: An Uneasy Face-Off For Government To Face
Thrust into controversy by Edward Snowden’s first revelations last year, President Obama belatedly welcomed a “conversation” about privacy. As cynical as you may feel about US spying, that conversation with the federal government has now begun. In particular, the...
How To Think About Big Data And Privacy
There was a great passage in Alexis Madrigal’s recent interview with Gibu Thomas, who runs innovation at Walmart: “Our philosophy is pretty simple: When we use data, be transparent to the customers so that they can know what’s going on. There’s a clear opt-out...
How To Reconcile Big Data and Privacy
In many ways “big data” and “encryption” are antithetical. The former involves harvesting, storing and analyzing information to reveal patterns that researchers, law enforcement and industry can use to their benefit. The goal of the latter is to obscure that data from...
Can we protect ourselves from online privacy threats?
Are hackers, long considered a threat, now the best defence we’ve got? For years, since the emergence of Wikileaks as a media sensation, we’ve been aware of a group of digital activists who have warned us, often in apocalyptic language, about the scope and scale of...
Why civil rights groups are warning against ‘big data’
The backlash against the government's use of bulk phone records for intelligence purposes has been led mostly by technologists used to speaking the language of privacy. But a new push by civil rights organizations to challenge "big data" — both in the public and...
The Use and Abuse of Big Data and Hadoop
Big data analytics is having a huge impact on us all. The ability to collect, store and analyze massive amounts of disparate data---using analytics platforms such as Hadoop in the cloud to uncover hidden connections, correlations and insights---is playing a bigger...
Wearable technology in business: big data benefits bring legal and privacy risks
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), held in Las Vegas each January, reveals tech vendors' latest visions of the future. This year many of them were marketing a vision replete with wearable devices. Market analysts also envision a bright future for wearable tech....
Top Big Data Apps for Security
Companies are continually searching for new ways to get more value out of their data. Several months ago we published an article on how Big Data can be used to improve security, looking primarily at what the company KEYW was doing in this arena. KEYW is far from the...
Leveraging Big Data and Cloud for Better Security
Organizations are exploring a variety of technologies and techniques to bolster their security, including big data analytics and cloud-based security services. As the sophistication of information security breaches continues to grow, organizations realize that they...
Privacy and technology: How simple photos are leading to full profiles of ordinary people
We’re no longer just strangers in a crowd. Imagine any street corner in any Bay Area town where, let’s say, four people — Alexandria, Larry, Cory and Cameron — are lost in private thought. Without a single conversation, without even knowing their names, we could learn...
Army finds its own way to build a big data system
The Army is harnessing big data to help commanders answer questions that were previously unsolvable by pulling relevant information from thousands of databases into a holistic common operating picture, specifically focused on readiness and resources. The Army...
Despite Privacy Concerns, Identified Rolls Out Tool for Smarter Recruiting
LinkedIn is an essential tool for recruiters, a network where individuals’ professional qualifications are emphasized and easily searchable. But according to Adeyemi Ajao, the co-founder of Identified, a big data and analytics company focused on professional...
Big data has made privacy obsolete
Watching the legal system deal with the Internet is like watching somebody trying to drive a car by looking only in the rear-view mirror. The results are amusing and predictable but not really interesting. On the other hand, watching the efforts of regulators —...
Big Data Shakes Up Security (Which Isn’t Always Good)
Cyber-security and cyber-criminals are engaged in a constant arms race. The minute a software vulnerability gets patched or a security tool is able to block a class of attacks, malware writers shift gears and look for something new to exploit. For years, security...
How Big Data Analytics Can Boost Network Security
Conventional wisdom has it that a surefire way of getting your credit card black-flagged is to fill up two or more vehicles with gas and purchase expensive sneakers within a short space of time. That's because this type of spending behavior is rare, and it's also...
This man thinks big data and privacy can co-exist, and here’s his plan
If you’re in the tech industry, particularly the U.S. tech industry, then you’re probably not a big fan of European privacy officials. And German data protection regulators may well feature in your nightmares. After all, Germany is literally the birthplace of data...
Building big data? Are you building a security headache too?
The world and its dog has been shocked by the Prism news story. Early in June, we found out that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had developed a secret data-gathering mechanism to steal all our data and store it in a large data warehouse. We are outraged that it...
Amplifying security intelligence with big data
Leading security intelligence solutions today rely upon a set of structured and semi-structured data sources, including logs, network traffic and others, to provide the Security Operations Center with an on-going real-time view of their organization’s security...