White House Releases Big Data, Privacy Progress Report

wrote John Podesta, counselor to President Barack Obama, in a blog post Thursday announcing the White House’s release of an interim progress report on big data and privacy legislative efforts. The report’s release comes about a year after Podesta released a report on data collection in the U.S. “One novel finding of the working group report was the potential for big data technologies to circumvent longstanding civil rights protections and enable new forms of discrimination in housing, employment, and access to credit, among other areas,” Podesta said. The new report said the Obama administration has made progress on ensuring “student educational data is used only for educational purposes” and that “in the big-data era,” technologies aren't used “inadvertently or deliberately” to discriminate. The report includes six priority policy recommendations and “a host of smaller initiatives to further the conversation about big data and privacy,” such as creating a national standard for companies to notify customers in the event of a data breach, investing in big data research and technologies, and extending Privacy Act protections to non-U.S. persons. “Big data technologies raise serious concerns about how we protect personal privacy and our other values,” Podesta said. “As more data is collected, analyzed, and stored on both public and private systems, we must be vigilant in ensuring the balance of power is retained between government and citizens and between businesses and consumers.”