It requires some very smart thinking to maintain privacy and yet learn from all the data that's out there.
The things that are most private are the content of your email messages, your medical records,
your financial status, including what you do on taxes.
And for me, the upside is in social services and health.
If we had a way of saying yes, we collect data, but it's not revealing individual records.
Well you can have, I believe, data privacy and still see things.
Like, is this drug causing side effects for a certain group of people?
Now you don't want the medical record to be revealed publicly.
But if you permission in certain researchers to look for correlations, they have to see a lot of that data
in order to find and say, wait a minute, this drug shouldn't be used by this group of people.
Likewise, social programs.
The government puts in all these different, okay, here's this tax credit for this, this low cost housing thing.
Actually examining, are the beneficiaries really getting what you expected?
The data gathering could let you be a lot smarter about that.