Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, CONSUMER PROTECTION NEWS: Consumer, industry reps spar over need for rules on “Big Data”, (Sep 16, 2014)

By Brian Hammond, TRDaily

Whether the path forward on big data will require new regulations or legislation was a matter of dispute among panelists at an FTC workshop yesterday, as consumer advocates said that regulatory gaps need to be filled, while some industry officials suggested that there's no evidence of any problems that require action.

During a panel discussion on "considerations on the path forward" at the FTC's "Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion?" event, Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said there are regulatory gaps in the use of big data analytics. As an example, he cited the collection of public information from background checks used by a potential employer. A common problem is that many people have the same name, meaning that someone could get an arrest record mistakenly attached to his or her profile, he said.

"This is a classic example of a market failure here because the customer is not Chris Calabrese, it's the company," which may accept a certain degree of inaccuracy in the records to avoid hiring a criminal.

Daniel Castro, senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was more cautious. "There are so many opportunities to use big data for good," he said. Castro recommended thinking about how to use big data to find and address societal problems rather than just thinking about the potential problems it could cause.

Jeanette Fitzgerald, general counsel and chief privacy officer at Epsilon, said she did not see the need for further regulation because "there's a lot of self-regulation out there that already exists."

Michael Spadea, director of Promontory Financial Group, noted that the "evidence to say that we need legislation now is not there.”

"As this industry continues to develop and we have more information about harms and about benefits, we need to continue to have this discussion," Spadea said.

Another topic of discussion was the importance of having best practices for how to handle big data and the privacy risks that could arise from its use.

Christopher Wolf, senior partner at Hogan Lovells, founder and chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, and chair of the Anti-Defamation League's National Civil Rights Committee, said there should be risk-benefit analyses for data collection. "Having a methodology, a framework, a discipline is essential," he observed.

Offering recommendations on what steps should be taken going forward, Castro favored policy recommendations to encourage more use of big data. "We really need to think about the benefits here," he said. "The biggest risk is not how the data is being used. It's that we won't use it enough."

Fitzgerald called for educating consumers about the data that's being used. "We should teach them that they can talk to the companies that have their data, ask questions, and those people can help them," she said.

Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said getting consumers educated would be a "huge benefit," adding that it would "benefit data brokers to be a little bit more forthcoming."

News: ConsumerProtection Privacy FederalTradeCommissionNews