Feb 25th 2010 | from the print edition
TWO centuries after Gutenberg invented movable type in the mid-1400s there were plenty of books around, but they were expensive and poorly made. In Britain a cartel had a lock on classic works such as Shakespeare’s and Milton’s. The first copyright law, enacted in the early 1700s in the Bard’s home country, was designed to free knowledge by putting books in the public domain after a short period of exclusivity, around 14 years. Laws protecting free speech did not emerge until the late 18th century. Before print became widespread the need was limited.
Now the information flows in an era of abundant data are changing the relationship between technology and the role of the state once again. Many of today’s rules look increasingly archaic. Privacy laws were not designed for networks. Rules for document retention presume paper records. And since all the information is interconnected, it needs global rules.
New principles for an age of big data sets will need to cover six broad areas: privacy, security, retention, processing, ownership and the integrity of information.
Privacy is one of the biggest worries. People are disclosing more personal information than ever. Social-networking sites and others actually depend on it. But as databases grow, information that on its own cannot be traced to a particular individual can often be unlocked with just a bit of computer effort.
This tension between individuals’ interest in protecting their privacy and companies’ interest in exploiting personal information could be resolved by giving people more control. They could be given the right to see and correct the information about them that an organisation holds, and to be told how it was used and with whom it was shared.
Today’s privacy rules aspire to this, but fall short because of technical difficulties which the industry likes to exaggerate. Better technology should eliminate such problems. Besides, firms are already spending a great deal on collecting, sharing and processing the data; they could divert a sliver of that money to provide greater individual control.
The benefits of information security—protecting computer systems and networks—are inherently invisible: if threats have been averted, things work as normal. That means it often gets neglected. One way to deal with that is to disclose more information. A pioneering law in California in 2003 required companies to notify people if a security breach had compromised their personal information, which pushed companies to invest more in prevention. The model has been adopted in other states and could be used more widely.
In addition, regulators could require large companies to undergo an annual information-security audit by an accredited third party, similar to financial audits for listed companies. Information about vulnerabilities would be kept confidential, but it could be used by firms to improve their practices and handed to regulators if problems arose. It could even be a requirement for insurance coverage, allowing a market for information security to emerge.
Current rules on digital records state that data should never be stored for longer than necessary because they might be misused or inadvertently released. But Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the National University of Singapore worries that the increasing power and decreasing price of computers will make it too easy to hold on to everything. In his recent book “Delete” he argues in favour of technical systems that “forget”: digital files that have expiry dates or slowly degrade over time.
Yet regulation is pushing in the opposite direction. There is a social and political expectation that records will be kept, says Peter Allen of CSC, a technology provider: “The more we know, the more we are expected to know—for ever.” American security officials have pressed companies to keep records because they may hold clues after a terrorist incident. In future it is more likely that companies will be required to retain all digital files, and ensure their accuracy, than to delete them.
Processing data is another concern. Ian Ayres, an economist and lawyer at Yale University and the author of “Super-Crunchers”, a book about computer algorithms replacing human intuition, frets about the legal implications of using statistical correlations. Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, goes further: she worries about the “ethics of super-crunching”. For example, racial discrimination against an applicant for a bank loan is illegal. But what if a computer model factors in the educational level of the applicant’s mother, which in America is strongly correlated with race? And what if computers, just as they can predict an individual’s susceptibility to a disease from other bits of information, can predict his predisposition to committing a crime?
A new regulatory principle in the age of big data, then, might be that people’s data cannot be used to discriminate against them on the basis of something that might or might not happen. The individual must be regarded as a free agent. This idea is akin to the general rule of national statistical offices that data gathered for surveys cannot be used against a person for things like deporting illegal immigrants—which, alas, has not always been respected.
Privacy rules lean towards treating personal information as a property right. A reasonable presumption might be that the trail of data that an individual leaves behind and that can be traced to him, from clicks on search engines to book-buying preferences, belong to that individual, not the entity that collected it. Google’s “data liberation” initiative mentioned earlier in this report points in that direction. That might create a market for information. Indeed, “data portability” stimulates competition, just as phone-number portability encourages competition among mobile operators. It might also reduce the need for antitrust enforcement by counteracting data aggregators’ desire to grow ever bigger in order to reap economies of scale.
Ensuring the integrity of the information is an important part of the big-data age. When America’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, lambasted the Chinese in January for allegedly hacking into Google’s computers, she used the term “the global networked commons”. The idea is that the internet is a shared environment, like the oceans or airspace, which requires international co-operation to make the best use of it. Censorship pollutes that environment. Disrupting information flows not only violates the integrity of the data but quashes free expression and denies the right of assembly. Likewise, if telecoms operators give preferential treatment to certain content providers, they undermine the idea of “network neutrality”.
Governments could define best practice on dealing with information flows and the processing of data, just as they require firms to label processed foods with the ingredients or impose public-health standards. The World Trade Organisation, which oversees the free flow of physical trade, might be a suitable body for keeping digital goods and services flowing too. But it will not be quick or easy.
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