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myBigData! Conquering the World with Personal Privacy

Sogeti Labs
February 21, 2013

myXYZ is a well-known Web-driven concept, as in mySAP, so why am I missing Big Data? Okay, Big Data has been called “the new oil and currency,” but what do I take from it? I am no Sheikh nor a Texan, and currency is for politicians and bankers. So where’s the money? My personal win? In myBigData, I assure you! Now to privacy. Often, we take it to mean something we easily lose these days by courtesy of privacy-invasive digital tech. Quite right but that’s the defensive side. Instead, we should take myBigData privacy to be our most valued personal weapon for conquering the world. For monetizing commercial relationships. myBigData: the New Frontier Now to questions like the ones I started with. The honorable Ira Rubinstein from NYU Law School has a healthy tendency to pose them. His new article, to be published in an Oxford Journal called International Data Privacy Law, bears the following title: “Big Data: The End of Privacy or a New Beginning?” Nicely put, Mr. Rubinstein. Slowly we are starting to get it: we have a world to conquer with our personal privacy, with myBigData! Now to examples. Ira Rubinstein mentions the Vendor Relationship Management approach (VRM) of Doc Searls, advocated by John Hagel III. In earlier work Mr. Rubinstein dissed the enthusiasm – not the concept itself – of Privacy by Design evangelists. Rightly so: conquering any world may well be hard and dangerous. So where do I see this personal myBigData win? My pet example would be Microsoft HealthVault. [Dutch version here.] And my pet privacy-enhancing technology would be Differential Privacy for Everyone, developed over the past years by Microsoft Research. You can check the HealthVault ecosystem in this marvellous cartoon, the centerpiece of which is depicted above. As you can see: “Consumers have control over what information goes into their HealthVault record, and what others may access.” The economic model? This way we can irrigate all kinds of commercial relationships with our Personally Identifiable Info (PII or myBigData). We tap it from the data faucet that admittedly has an ice-cold PIT side (Privacy-Invasive Tech) to be mixed with PET (Privacy-Enhancing Tech) in a properly engineered Privacy by Design environment towards mature win-win VRM solutions. New VINT Big Data Report Coming Up Forthcoming along these lines is our new and fairly lengthy Big Data report in Dutch and English. It is simply called “Privacy, Technology and the Law,” after the installment of a special U.S. Senate Subcommittee by the Obama government.

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SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

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