Data Mining

05/16/2012
No-Fly List

Ninth Circuit Presses Government Lawyer on Watch Lists: “What Would You Do?”

By Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 1:53pm

A few weeks ago, Jay Stanley posted here about some of the dangers of “Big Data,” a sanitized term for data mining. When it’s employed by government security agencies in the search for terrorists, Jay wrote, there’s a substantial risk “that people will be tagged and suffer adverse consequences without due process, the ability to fight back, or even knowledge that they have been discriminated against.”

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05/10/2012
Checkpoint Society

A Creeping Private-Sector “Checkpoint Society”—and a Small Step to Protect Your Privacy

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 4:03pm

I was at a Target store recently and threw a bottle of wine in my cart to bring as a gift to a party. Later, when I got to the register, the cashier asked to see my ID. That in itself was silly, because it’s safe to say I’m a few years past the point where anyone might mistake me for someone under 21. But whatever; alcohol age-enforcement has gotten bureaucratic beyond all reason.

I held the ID up for her to see. Before I could react, she took my license from my fingers, held it up to a scanner, and BEEP!

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05/08/2012
Data Mining

Big Data: Revolution or Overhyped Fad?

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 8:43am

In a prior post I alluded to the fact that the buzzword “Big Data” is just a new term for “data mining.” The potential for big data analytics to discover new things about us is frightening from a privacy perspective, as I discussed. But, it can also be—let’s be honest—very cool.

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04/30/2012
Data Mining

The Potential Chilling Effects of Big Data

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 11:46am

Last week I posted about “Big Data” and how it is being used to discover new facts about people, to sift and sort them based on subtle patterns, to flag them as “risks” in this field or that, to predict their behavior, and to manipulate them for maximum profit.

Of course, humans are not sheep, and we don’t sit still when things like this happen to us. We perceive what is happening, and we change our behavior in response. We react. The effects of Big Data on privacy and society will be a game of three-dimensional chess, not checkers.

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04/25/2012
Data Mining

Eight Problems With “Big Data”

By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 3:06pm

The idea of “Big Data” is in the air. At the South by Southwest Interactive conference last month, it was probably the hot topic, dominating or surfacing in numerous panels, including one on which I spoke, on “Big Data: Privacy Threat or Business Model?”

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