Posts tagged data privacy
Data Sharing in a Post-Pandemic World: How to Safely Wind Down Surveillance Measures

Despite the recent news of successful COVID-19 vaccine trials, the end of the pandemic still seems a long way off. The data community, however, should be thinking ahead to the end of this crisis, when unique data demands will no longer apply. In this Op-ed, Hayden Dahmm explores how sunset clauses and provisions can be used to ensure that surveillance measures are wound down responsibly at the end of the pandemic.

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Scaling Big Data for Social Good: Weighing the Benefits and the Risks

Allowing data, particularly big data, to be shared between the public and private sectors has significant benefits. These include improved public services, transparency and citizen engagement – not to mention the potential for driving economic opportunities and business innovation. And the private sector has an important role to play, not only in leveraging the value of government open data, but in making some of its own data open or available to the public sector through collaboration. Many of these data-driven public-private partnerships have already proven successful. For instance, Uber released their data on traffic to aid transportation planners and city officials; Statistics Canada has partnered with smart meter companies to access electricity consumption data to better understand consumption patterns; and the telecommunications company, Airtel, shared data with the World Health Organization to help combat tuberculosis in India…Yet with great potential comes great risk. Big data sharing raises pressing questions about security, privacy and consent. These questions have become even more salient in recent years, as we’ve learned more about how our data has been handled by technology companies and others.

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