Obama Administration Places $200 Million Bet On Big Data

That's an absolutely unfounded concern.

I worked at a Big Data company. About 90% of my job was improving privacy while maintaining the integrity of medical data. The patient's zip code was reduced to 3 digits. Any references to states were removed and forgotten (because there are some zip codes that cross state lines). Any names were removed, as were any user-entered comments (doctor's notes, etc.) that might possibly contain personal information. Any personal information that is necessary for the system but might be identifiable is salted and hashed twice before it ever leaves the source (hospital, insurance provider, etc).

That in itself isn't good enough for privacy, so we then used some proprietary methods (that was kinda outside my job, so I don't know much about them) to intentionally screw up the data we provided to our users. A user could find out, for example, that between one and fifty people in the vicinity of Denver had a particular medical condition on a particular date, and received a particular drug. Narrow down results more than that, and my company's system simply wouldn't fulfill the request.

This isn't really the exception to how many Big Data companies treat their data. Believe it or not, Big Data providers take privacy seriously, and are willing to sacrifice perfect accuracy to run an ethical operation. Anyone interested in Big Data is running on statistics anyway, so statistically-insignificant methods are easy to preserve privacy.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/rEaWxvp_HZg/obama-administration-places-200-million-bet-on-big-data

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