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Month: April 2016

A Social Contract for Data Collection

I just returned from Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose, where I gave a talk entitled “Kosher Collection: Best Practices in Data Handling“.  I really had an amazing time at Strata this year and major kudos to the organizers for putting on a great show.

The central premise of my talk is that in today’s world, there is a social contract between data collectors and consumers.  Essentially the agreement is that consumers give their personal data to a data collector in exchange for mutual benefit.  The problem is that consumers, in general, lack an understanding of the technology as well as data collection and as a result, are unable to provide informed consent.  Furthermore, this issue is likely to be exacerbated in the future as the opportunity to opt-out of mass data collection is disappearing.

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